Eventually I may get around to posting some properly chronological entries, starting from my earliest memories and going forward. But I had a request from my kids to write about how we came to make various international moves. I’ll start way before kids though, from the first time I moved anywhere on my own.
Off to university
Several of my high school friends had a clear vision of what they wanted to do in life. At least three wanted to be doctors and one a lawyer, and those four all made it into their intended professions. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I wanted to do or become. My father was a doctor but I had no interest in following in his footsteps. I was reasonably good, but certainly not exceptional, at math and liked science. I didn’t see myself as a math teacher and didn’t know what else one could do with math. We didn’t have guidance counsellors at my high school back in those days and though my parents were both college graduates they didn’t know anything about mathematically-related fields.
UCT, with Devil’s Peak and the eastern side of Table Mountain, as seen from the residence hall where I lived for 5 years |
Off to “war”
Most of my high school classmates had done their initial service directly after high school. A few of us, including the three who wanted to be doctors, were granted deferment to go to college first. That had advantages and disadvantage. The major downside was that if we had gone in 1973 like the rest, our initial service would have been just 9-11 months, but in the interim that had been increased to 2 years. On the other hand, most of those who went in 1973 were in the army and many saw active combat. Those of us who had graduated from college with degrees that were at least semi-useful were put into positions that made some use of our education.
Simon’s Town |
Gainfully employed!
UNISA offer letter |
UNISA offer conditions |
Back to Cape Town
IMT offer letter page 1 |
IMT offer letter page 2 |
IMT offer letter page 3 |
Tokai. Top: a view of the trails in the forest behind our house Middle: the Tokai Manor House Bottom: our house |
I worked at IMT for about a year. I wasn’t particularly happy there that time
around. That was probably mostly because
of my supervisor, with whom I had to work closely. He seemed to be out of it much of the
time. It wasn’t until later that I heard
he was quite ill and that it was either the illness or the medication for it
that made him drowsy. The work was
interesting – helping to devise tactics for avoiding anti-ship missiles. I had started at IMT just as the Royal Navy
was discovering in the Falklands War how vulnerable surface ships are to
anti-ship missiles.
Meanwhile, a former colleague at UNISA, Peter Salemink, had been teaching Applied Business Statistics in the Department of Business Science at UCT. He wanted to move back to Pretoria and was looking for someone to take over his position. Here was an opportunity to leave IMT and to work at UNT. Once again I was in the right place at the right time, with appropriate qualifications. I applied and was offered the position. That didn’t require a move, not even to a new house as our house in Tokai was about halfway between UCT and IMT.
UCT Business Science offer |
And back to Pretoria
UNISA 1985 offer |
In the middle of 1986 my mother was diagnosed with advanced
colon cancer. So it was good that we had
moved back to Pretoria because it meant we got to see her quite often in what
turned out to be the last year of her life.
One aspect of the timing of her death that was particularly unfortunate
was that she just missed seeing her first grandchild – Steven was born 19 days
after she passed away.
To Seattle
Unlike Mick, who was still single, I had a family to support, so the financial implications of becoming a full-time student again were more substantial. But I had been at UNISA long enough to have earned paid sabbatical leave and my mother had left me (and my two brothers) a small amount of money. So I started looking for places to do a PhD in the US, with a view to starting in 1990.
It is hard to imagine it now, but back in those days the web didn’t exist yet. It wasn’t possible to look up information about universities and courses online, because there wasn’t such a thing as online. Even email was still a novelty and I wasn’t yet aware of its existence. Somehow I obtained a copy of a booklet that had information about all the US universities offering PhD programs in statistics or biostatics. Using that, I took a systematic approach to deciding where to apply. As Riëtta and I were keen runners, I crossed off all universities in places where it seemed to be too hot in summer or too cold in winter for running to be pleasant. That left me with a list containing … nothing! So I had to revise my opinion of what was too hot or too cold. I ended up applying to three programs, in biostatistics at the University of Washington (UW) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The last of those was because a colleague at UNISA had spent a sabbatical there and spoke highly of the program.
In order to apply to those graduate programs I first had to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) and the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). I thought the latter requirement was a bit of a cheek considering that (a) English is my mother tongue and (b) the language used in the US should be called American because it is not standard English. I don’t recall where I took those exams, though it must have been somewhere in either Pretoria or Johannesburg. I must have done well enough to persuade at least one university that I wasn’t a total idiot.
The UW had had a small entering class in their graduate programs in the 1989/1990 academic year. Because I already had a master’s degree in statistics they offered me a place in their program starting in the middle of the academic year. The offer including “full support”, that is, reasonable financial assistance. So we moved to Seattle in March of 1990. At that stage UNC was still trying to determine whether my math background was adequate for entry into their program. I don’t recall whether I ever heard back from UTEP.
University of Washington admission letter |
We found an apartment within the first few days and settled
in. That December we saw snow falling
for the first time. I was 36 years old
and had never seen snow falling or even touched fresh snow (we’d seen some old
snow when we’d gone on a hike back in April or May). For the first few hours it was very exciting,
but by the next day when the whole city had shut down and we were trapped
inside it was no longer so wonderful. I
had gone downtown to do Christmas shopping and returned just as the snow
began. The timing and the amount of snow
caught the city by surprise. By the
evening commute the snow was already quite deep. Many people were trapped in their cars and
took hours to get home, some not making it until the next day. Buses were sliding down the steep Seattle
hills. It was a mess. YouTube has several videos of cars and buses
sliding in the snow on other occasions, such as this one (with a bus sliding at
about 3:30 in):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhZCyQ3emQg
Google Street View of the apartment where we lived in Seattle. Ours was the one of the ground floor to the right of the entrance. |
Seeing snow fall for the first time was exciting |
A few hours later it was still falling and soon becoming much less fun |
The bus system in Seattle is excellent (except when the
buses are sliding around in the snow).
We didn’t buy a car when we lived there.
We rented one on a few occasions to go on vacation and to be mobile for
the period in 1992 when my father visited us and Lisa was about to be born. My father and his new wife came to see us
(and my brother Mick) in the US on their honeymoon. Shortly after returning to South Africa my
father had his first stroke. (He had a
few more before passing away almost 5 years later.)
The “full support” would have been adequate to live on if I had been single. One of the conditions of my student visa was that Riëtta was not allowed to work. With our savings and the money my mother had left me running out, plus a now-expanded family, we couldn’t afford to stay in Seattle. Having received sabbatical support from UNISA, I was contractually obliged to return there for at least 6 months. So in June 1993 we reluctantly headed back to Pretoria. The reluctance was mostly because we had grown very fond of Seattle.
Some students in the UW Department of Biostatistics who had moved away from Seattle took a long time to finish their PhDs, with some bumping up against the university’s 10-year limit. So I was sent an official letter outlining the department’s concerns about me leaving the area.
University of Washington warning letter |
In Pretoria once
again
Back in Pretoria we rented a house a few blocks from my father. As we didn’t expect to stay there very long, we didn’t buy a car but borrowed one from my father. (He had recovered reasonably well, though not completely, from his first stroke and managed to return to work for a while.)
Steven had completed his first year of school in Seattle. It was the middle of the South African school year when we moved back. Initially when we tried to get him into a nearby public school they wanted him to wait until the next school year because he wasn’t quite 6 yet. But we persuaded them that as he had already had a full year of schooling that didn’t make sense and they relented and allowed him in.
On to Hobart
At some point towards the end of our time in Seattle a notice had appeared on our department’s noticeboard saying that Terry Dwyer, the Director of the Menzies Center for Population Health Research (as it was then called, now the Menzies Institute for Medical Research), an epidemiology research center at the University of Tasmania, would be visiting the UW and any biostatistics student who was interested in a job in Australia could meet him for lunch. I was the only one who turned up. Terry was also a runner and we ended up talking more about running than work. He was a shorter distance runner and 10K was about the upper limit of his racing, whereas it was towards the lower end of mine. Our best times for 10K (or 10,000m on the track) were almost identical. Apart from being a medical doctor and professor of Epidemiology, Terry was also involved in athletic administration. In our time in Hobart he served as President of Athletics Tasmania, the governing body for track and field in the state, and later was President of Athletics Australia, the corresponding body for the whole country.
Terry asked me to apply for a position at the Menzies Center, with our lunch together serving as my interview. Again, I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right qualifications (right 10K time?). A few months later I was offered the position. So we then made plans to pack up again for the move to Australia. We first had to get temporary residence permits approved. The paperwork came through eventually and we left South Africa in February 1994.
University of Tasmania offer |
We quickly found a house to rent in Hobart and bought a car. (We became friendly with Geoff and Helen, the couple from whom we rented the house. Geoff was also a runner and he and Riëtta often dueled in races.) We got Steven enrolled in a nearby school. That meant that in less than 12 months he had been in schools in three countries. Fortunately he adapted well.
I was still working on my dissertation, corresponding with my advisor, Margaret Pepe, by email. Margaret had also gone to the US as a graduate student, from Ireland. She is at least 5 years younger than me! She was a great advisor and very patient. In November 1994, a couple of months after I had turned 40, I flew back to Seattle for my final (oral) exam and to turn in my dissertation. Fortunately I passed the exam and, more importantly, didn’t have to make any last-minute changes to the dissertation. (Passing the final exam for a PhD is usually a formality. Although it may be nerve-wracking, an advisor shouldn’t let a student take the exam unless the student is ready. So about the only time a student may fail is if he/she insists on taking the exam before the advisor thinks he/she is ready.)
The Menzies Centre was doing important work. Their research contributed substantially to the SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) death rate declining to about one third of what it had been just a few years earlier. (The size and scope of the organization has increased substantially in the years since I left.) I learned a lot in my time there, particularly about epidemiology and about the vagaries of data collection. I have never regretted dragging the family off to the far end of the earth.
While at the Menzies Centre I came to realize how important it is for a statistician to have a good understanding of how the data in a study are actually collected – not just how they are supposed to be collected. That helps provide insight into the sources of variability in the data and what kinds of errors can occur. You would probably be surprised by how easily things can be screwed up, even for something as supposedly elementary as measuring height. One of our studies was of exercise induced asthma in young children. We measured their lung function before and after having them run for a few minutes. Lung function is dependent on body size, so we needed to measure their heights. We had a stadiometer that we were planning to use for the height measurements. Our stadiometer had a fixed scale for very short heights, and a sliding part to use beyond that. The kids were of an age at which some of them were measurable with the fixed part of the stadiometer while for others we needed to use the sliding part. Whoever had assembled the stadiometer had messed something up, so that the sliding part gave incorrect readings. The instructions had been lost and I couldn’t fix the instrument to work correctly. So I said we should stick a tape measure against a wall and use that. Once the pilot study was over and the real study began, some bright spark decided that as we had a stadiometer, it should be used rather than the tape measure. Whoever made that decision didn’t tell me. When it came time to analyze the results the heights were a mess. Many of the kids had become shorter than when they had been measured a couple of years earlier! That obviously shouldn’t happen with kids in the age range 6-9 years. So the data were essentially unusable.
A stadiometer – not the same as the one we used |
Tasmania is very scenic and is a great place to visit. Living there year-round is less
pleasant. It is rather isolated and the
weather is often poor as it is situated slap-bang in the middle of the Roaring
Forties. I was the only PhD-level
biostatistician in the state and being a newly-minted PhD I didn’t have anyone
who could mentor me professionally. So I
started to look for other positions, either elsewhere in Australia or in the
US. Another factor was that we had done
some house-hunting in Hobart but couldn’t find anything affordable that was
reasonably well built. If we’d managed
to buy a house we might still have been there now. Further, public schools in Tasmania are not
very good, particularly in the higher grades, and we couldn’t afford to send
our kids to private schools. The running
scene was also rather primitive, reminiscent of that in South Africa 15+ years
earlier.
I applied unsuccessfully for at least one position elsewhere in Australia, I think it was in Newcastle. I probably have a rejection letter packed away somewhere, or maybe the advertisement for the job. I also applied and was flown over to the US for an interview at the University of Arizona in Tucson. A year or so later I was invited for another interview at the University of Arizona. This time I took the family along too for a vacation. Apart from going to Tucson, we went to Disney World (and Gatorland) and to Seattle. Shortly before leaving for the US I applied for a position in the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They interviewed me by telephone and when they heard I was going to be in the US, invited me for an in-person interview. (They wouldn’t have paid for me to fly all the way from Tasmania, though were willing to pay for a flight from Seattle. So, again, I was going to be in more-or-less the right place at the right time with the right qualifications.) We hastily changed our plans, with the rest of the family flying home from Seattle and me first going on to Chapel Hill. My interview was on a Friday and Monday, straddling the weekend in which UNC was playing in the 1998 NCAA Final Four (basketball, for those who don’t know – which I certainly didn’t). I was told that if UNC won there would be big parties in downtown Chapel Hill and I would hear plenty of noise. UNC lost in the semi-final, so I didn’t get to hear/see what the celebrations are like.
I ended up being offered positions by both the University of Arizona and UNC. I think UNC offered somewhat more money. A bigger factor was that Arizona didn’t have a school of public health yet and I would have been in a very small biostatistics group, whereas UNC had a highly ranked school of public health and a large and well-regarded Department of Biostatistics. So I accepted the UNC offer.
UNC offer |
Moving to Chapel Hill
Our house in Chapel Hill |
In the first few years here I was sometimes very frustrated by the CSCC leadership and UNC more generally. For instance, they made minimal effort to help us obtain permanent residence status, even though it was in their interests if they wanted to keep me. At one point I applied for a position at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. They flew the whole family out for an interview and eventually offered me a position. But they didn’t yet have a school of public health or a biostatistics department and it wasn’t clear that I would be any better off. So we stayed put.
I’ve had a couple ore interviews since then, both after I had been contacted by a recruiter rather than me looking for a new position. One of them was with a private company in this area. They made me a quite substantial offer. We had had a change of leadership in our center and department. Our department chair immediately made me a counter-offer. It wasn’t as much as I was being offered, but that they bothered to counter so quickly showed that they cared and that was part of the reason I turned down the position. Another interview was in the Washington, DC, area. I was reluctant even to go for the interview, but they were quite persistent. However, just after that there was a leadership change in their organization and maybe because of that, plus my expressed reluctance, they didn’t make me an offer. I wasn’t disappointed. Now I expect to stay where I am until I retire (or am fired).
Although I don’t expect to move to another job, at some point we may move house, perhaps to a nearby retirement community, before I go to my final resting place. For the latter I presume I will once again be in the right place, with the right qualifications and hope it will be right time – neither too early nor too late.