- Rosanna Guadagno, an academic from California, has lived in five states, moving for work.
- She struggled living in Alabama and Texas and returned to California, but it wasn't the same.
- After her mother died and she got divorced, Guadagno moved with her two kids to Finland in 2022.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Rosanna Guadagno, an academic in Finland, about her experience moving within the US and to Finland. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm a Gen X child from the San Francisco Bay Area. Growing up, I was always interested in people.
I graduated with a psychology degree from Santa Clara University in 1994. I thought the life of a professor looked pretty sweet. In 1995, I moved from California to Phoenix for grad school.
Since that first move, I've lived in Alabama, Virginia, and Texas and returned to the Bay Area. I left the US and moved to Finland with my two kids. I finally found everything I'd hoped for here.
My community in Alabama was like a family
Arizona is very similar to California, so my first out-of-state move wasn't a culture shock. The main difference was that the Bay Area was more diverse than Phoenix at that time. Once I'd finished my Ph. D., I applied for jobs all over the country.
In 2006, I was offered a job as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama straight out of grad school.
People I knew in California warned me about what Alabama would be like. But when I visited the university in Tuscaloosa, my colleagues were wonderful. I thought it would be a great community, plus the cost of living was much cheaper than in California.
I'd just got married, and my husband and I felt that, with our combined incomes, we'd have a really nice life there, starting a family. We bought a big house in a neighborhood where other professors lived.
It was a great community. When my twins were born in 2008, my colleagues organized meals, so we had a new casserole every three days for the first six weeks. It was like a family.
But I was also an outsider in Alabama
My students called me a "Yankee" in my class. I was an outsider.
As a new teacher at the University of Alabama, I remember teaching a class about racism and stereotyping in the early 2000s.
It went horribly wrong when some of the students made racist comments. During the interaction, I initially froze and didn't know how to shut it down. After it happened a few times, I learned to challenge students if they said racist things. But it was tiresome and made me angry.
Once, the police pulled me over for speeding in a construction zone near my house. I felt they were treating me differently because of my Latin heritage, and I found the experience terrifying. I'd never thought about my privilege until it was taken away.
Over time, incidents kept adding up. The final straw was when one of my kids came home from preschool and said something racist. I was really upset. My children's father and I decided it was time to leave.
Texas was a hard place to live
I quit my job, and our family left Alabama in 2012 after nearly 10 years. We moved to Virginia for my new job at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC. That was great. But my contract was only three years before you were meant to return to your university.
Two years later, in 2014, I got another job at the University of Texas at Dallas. I'd spent time in Austin before and thought Dallas would be similar.
It wasn't — I found Dallas a very hard place to live, and the culture shocked me.
The politics was really in your face in Dallas. I also found people I was meeting were friendly but not welcoming. I felt some moms didn't want to hang out with me because I didn't go to their church. I was also shocked by the amount of gun ownership.
The traffic was as bad as LA, and I had a wretched commute. Some days, I wouldn't get home until 10 p.m., which meant I couldn't be present for my children.
Dallas is a much larger city than Tuscaloosa, so I didn't have a tight-knit group of colleagues to buffer the problems I had there.
I was up for tenure, which meant I'd finally have job security, and I was getting paid decently. But I wasn't happy. My husband at the time, now my ex-husband, was a software engineer. He got a job working for Big Tech in Silicon Valley. We decided to leave Texas and move back to California in 2016.
The Bay Area had changed so much
We moved to Half Moon Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 2017, I got a job at UC Berkeley. I was initially happy to be in California, but the reality started to set in quickly.
My husband was expected to work long hours. Commuting from university and picking my kids up from school on the way could take me three hours.
California wasn't the same as it was when I was there in my 20s. The cost of living was much higher, and everything was expensive. People moved in and out of the Bay Area a lot, so it was hard to make lasting social connections.
I was struggling personally. My brother and I became estranged because of politics, and my mother died in 2020. When the pandemic hit, I fell apart. My marriage fell apart. I felt upside-down and untethered from the world because of so much loss.
I needed to leave the US
By the end of 2021, I was getting divorced and worried about being able to afford to send my twins to college in the States. At the time, I was working in disinformation research for Stanford.
I was concerned about women's reproductive rights and a rollback of LGBTQ+ rights. Both of my children are LGBTQ+, and I worried they wouldn't be safe. I wanted to move to a country where my kids might have a better life.
I said to my kids: "I think we need a change. How do you feel about moving outside of the country?" They were up for it.
I moved my family to Finland
I started an international job search in 2021 and was offered a job at the University of Oulu in Finland. I moved to Oulu with my kids in August 2022 on a specialist visa, and when that expires, I plan to apply for citizenship.
My kids have had a positive experience with the education system. They go to a free international school that focuses on well-being as well as academic success. My commute is 10 minutes, and it takes my kids five minutes to walk to school.
The government pays for public college, even for a master's degree, for students from EU countries and Switzerland. If our application for citizenship is approved, my fears about paying for college are gone.
Finland is everything we hoped for
As residents, healthcare in Finland universal, and is free or very cheap. The quality is much better than I expected. In 2022, I slipped on ice and had a bad fall. Not having to worry about medical bills was a relief.
I make slightly more than what I did at Stanford, but my money goes much further here than it did in California.
I don't mind it when it's dark for most of the day in winter. We use lamps and take Vitamin D tablets. But I struggle to sleep, even with blackout curtains, when it is light most of the night. I miss my friends in the US and my partner's family. It's sad that it's difficult to travel home.
But it has been everything we'd hoped for. It was the right choice for us.
If you've moved across the US or relocated to another country and would like to share your story, email [email protected].