Rosanna Guadagno, an academic from California, has lived in five states while traveling for work. She struggled to make ends meet in Alabama and Texas, and returned to California, but things were never the same. After her mother died and they divorced, Guadagno moved in with her. I will send my two children to Finland in 2022.
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This told essay is based on a transcript of a conversation I had with Finnish scholar Rosanna Guadagno about her experiences moving within the United States and to Finland. Edited for length and clarity.
I’m a Gen Xer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Growing up, I was always interested in people.
I graduated from Santa Clara University in 1994 with a degree in Psychology. I thought that the life of a professor was very wonderful. In 1995, I moved from California to Phoenix for graduate school.
Since my first move, I have lived in Alabama, Virginia, Texas, and back to the Bay Area. I left America and moved to Finland with my two children. Finally found everything I wanted 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 the time. After completing my PhD, I applied for jobs all over the country.
In 2006, right out of graduate school, I was offered a position as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama.
People I knew in California warned me about what would happen in Alabama. But when I visited the university in Tuscaloosa, my colleagues were great. I thought the cost of living was much lower than California and it was a great community.
I had just gotten married, and my husband and I felt that with our combined incomes, we could start a family there and have a very happy life. We bought a big house in the neighborhood where other professors lived.
It was a great community. When my twins were born in 2008, a co-worker organized the meals for me, so I prepared a new casserole every three days for the first six weeks. It felt like family.
But I was also an outsider in Alabama
In class, students called him “Yankee.” I was an outsider.
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As a new teacher at the University of Alabama, I remember teaching a class on racism and stereotyping in the early 2000s.
It went horribly wrong as some students made racist comments. During the interaction, it froze at first and I didn’t know how to shut it down. After it happened a few times, I learned to argue when a student said something racist. But it was a hassle and I got frustrated.
Once, I was stopped by the police for speeding at a construction site near my house. I felt like they were treating me differently because of my Latino heritage, and the experience was terrifying. I never thought about my privilege until it was taken away.
As time passed, incidents continued to increase. The last crisis was when one of my children came home from kindergarten and said something racist. I was really upset. My children’s father and I decided it was time to move out.
Texas was a difficult place to live.
I quit my job and moved my family to Alabama in 2012, nearly 10 years later. We moved to Virginia for new jobs at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC. That was great. But my contract was only for three years before you had to go back to college.
Two years later, in 2014, I took a new job at the University of Texas at Dallas. I had previously spent time in Austin and thought Dallas would be similar.
That wasn’t the case. Dallas is a very difficult place to live and its culture shocked me.
Politics is right in front of you in Dallas. I also found the people I met to be friendly, but not welcoming. I felt that some moms didn’t want to hang out with me because I didn’t go to church. I was also surprised at how many guns they owned.
The traffic was just as bad as LA and the commute was miserable. Some days I didn’t get home until 10pm, and I didn’t get to see my kids.
Dallas is a much larger city than Tuscaloosa, so I didn’t have a close-knit group of colleagues to help defuse any problems that arose there.
I was on track for tenure, so I finally had job security and was receiving a decent salary. But I wasn’t happy. My then-husband, now ex-husband, was a software engineer. He got a job at a big tech company in Silicon Valley. We decided to leave Texas in 2016 and move back to California.
The Bay Area has completely changed.
We moved to Half Moon Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area and took jobs at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. At first I was happy to be in California, but reality soon set in.
My husband was expected to work long hours. It could take three hours to commute to university and then pick up my kids from school on the way.
California wasn’t the same when I was there in my 20s. The cost of living was much higher and everything was expensive. People were constantly coming and going in the Bay Area, making it difficult to form lasting social connections.
Personally, I had a hard time. My brother and I were estranged because of politics, and my mother passed away in 2020. When the pandemic hit, I fell apart. My marriage fell apart. With so much loss, I felt turned upside down and untethered from the world.
I had to leave America.
By the end of 2021, I was going through a divorce and was worried about whether I would be able to send my twins to college in America. At the time, I was studying disinformation at Stanford University.
I was concerned about the rollback of women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights. Both of my children are LGBTQ+, so I was worried that they wouldn’t be safe. I wanted to move to a country where my children might have a better life.
I told the children: “I think we need a change. How do you feel about moving abroad?” They were prepared for it.
I moved my family to Finland
I started my international job search in 2021 and was offered a job at the University of Oulu in Finland. I will move to Oulu with my children on a specialist visa in August 2022 and plan to apply for citizenship when it expires.
My children have a good experience with the education system. They attend a free international school that values well-being, not just academic success. My commute is 10 minutes, but my kids walk to school in 5 minutes.
For students from EU member states and Switzerland, the government pays tuition fees at public universities, even for master’s degrees. If my citizenship application is approved, my worries about college tuition will disappear.
Finland is everything we wanted
Healthcare in Finland is universally available to residents and is either free or very cheap. The quality is much better than expected. In 2022, I slipped on the ice and had a big fall. I feel relieved that I no longer have to worry about medical expenses.
My income is slightly more than I made at Stanford, but far more money is spent here than I made in California.
In winter, I don’t care if it’s pitch black all day. I use a lamp and take vitamin D tablets. But even with blackout curtains, it’s hard to sleep when it’s mostly bright at night. I miss my friends and my partner’s family in America. It’s a pity that it is difficult to return home.
But it was everything we wanted. It was the right choice for us.
If you’ve moved across the United States or to another country and would like to share your story, email us at ehopkins@businessinsider.com.
