Crossing Over: Part 2 of 3 - The Arrival

You arrive in every country you move to, twice. First time is in your imagination. This is the version you have assemble from other people's accounts, institutional reputation, cultural exports, and your own projection of what life there will feel like. You tend to relish the positives and minimise the uncertainty – “Que sera sera!” – you tell yourself. Finally the day comes when you arrive in the new country which you intend to make your home in at least for a while and that is when things start really sinking in. The gap between those two arrivals is where the real experience of international relocation begins. For many folks who have made this transition, it is rarely as easy as they hope or as bad as they fear.

In the first piece in this series I wrote about the decision to move abroad — the why, the what, and the things most people underestimate before they commit. This piece is about what comes next: the classroom, the culture, the slow work of assimilation, and the moments that mark the shift from being someone who lives in a country to someone who belongs to it. I am drawing on two distinct experiences — the United States, where I went for my MBA, and the United Kingdom, where I eventually settled — and where the contrast between the two is as instructive as either experience alone.

A bubble within a glass dome

For most international students, the first sustained encounter with their new country is not with its average citizens, suburban culture, 0r white-collar professionals. It is with the educational institution they attend which can be its own little universe. And for many, particularly those coming from more rigid or hierarchical educational traditions, the institution is where the first genuine surprise arrives. What struck me most about studying in the US was the flexibility in what I could choose to learn and immerse myself in. The curriculum was far less rigid than anything I had encountered in medical training in India. There was genuine choice in which courses to take, which concentrations to pursue, and how to shape the programme around your own interests and goals rather than a fixed sequence determined by the institution. That flexibility, once you learn to use it rather than be paralysed by it, is one of the more practically valuable things an American education offers. The other thing that struck me was the virtual absence of any friction in day-to-day campus life and particularly in the process of engaging with the academics. Accessing course material online, taking exams, getting from one class to another, being able to grab a bite on day with a packed calendar, ability to get prints from practically any one of the dozens of printers on campus – everything was designed in a way that allows you to just focus on the academic experience.

What I had not anticipated was the degree to which the boundaries of my own discipline would become permeable. I had gone for an MBA, but I found myself involved in student organisations in the biomedical research community, participating in a consulting group that worked across scientific and commercial functions, and partnering with students from material sciences on early-stage startup commercialisation projects. None of this was formally required, in fact, the business school had several clubs, academic and professional societies, and competitions that would be organised. But the cross-disciplinary network I built during that period has remained more professionally useful than almost anything I learned in a lecture hall.

The third dimension that distinguished the experience was the orientation toward action. A significant proportion of the coursework was built around real problems, real organisations, and real stakes — consulting engagements, live case analyses, leadership simulation challenges, project-based learning with external partners. The gap between classroom and practice was deliberately narrow. I should note that some of what I am describing may be specific to the MBA format rather than to American higher education in general. At the same time, the fact that I was able to easily find students from other disciplines engaged in everything from providing consulting services to commercialising inventions and ideas born in their labs shows that action-oriented learning is fostered across disciplines. The cross-disciplinary openness and the flexibility of the curriculum embedded in the institutional culture of the campus itself.

Getting on the exceptionalist treadmill

One of the things that makes the United States relatively navigable for international arrivals — despite its scale, its complexity, and its genuine strangeness in many respects — is that it operates on high-signal social norms. Americans tend to tell you where you stand, maybe not directly at all times but clearly enough for anyone interested in knowing. Enthusiasm is expressed openly. Ambition is not only permitted but expected. Professional and social interactions tend to be explicit rather than layered, direct rather than coded. For someone arriving from a culture with more indirect communication patterns, this legibility is a genuine relief in the early months.

What takes longer to understand is what that legibility costs. American professional culture, particularly in commercial and academic environments, operates at a level of social performance that is sustained and demanding. The networking is not optional, it is structural. The self-presentation expected in most professional contexts requires a degree of confident, outward-facing energy that does not come naturally to everyone, and that can be exhausting to maintain if it is not in your nature. The hypercapitalist texture of the society — the material orientation, the emphasis on achievement and visible success — can be energising at first but begin to feel like a burden over time, particularly for those from cultures where professional identity and personal identity are more cleanly separated.

None of this is a criticism. The US offers genuine opportunity, openness, and a professional environment that rewards ambition and capability with a directness that many other markets do not match. But arriving with an accurate picture of what the social and professional operating environment actually demands rather than the version exported through media and institutional marketing, makes the adjustment considerably more manageable.

Finding the right balance

Moving to the United Kingdom presented a different kind of challenge — one that is easy to underestimate precisely because the surface markers of difference are less obvious. The language is shared, the institutional frameworks are familiar, and the cultural exports are well-known. What is less obvious until you are inside it is that British culture operates on a register of understatement, reserve, and indirection that can be genuinely difficult to read, particularly for those who have just spent time in the US and have recalibrated toward explicit communication.

My own arrival was shaped by unusual circumstances. I moved to the UK a few weeks before the COVID lockdowns began in early 2020, which meant the normal process of settling in, exploring, and building a social context was compressed and then suspended entirely. In some respects this made the early period harder; in others it simplified it, since working from home meant that full immersion in British office culture came gradually rather than all at once, by which point I was already settled in my role and had more bandwidth to absorb the cultural texture at a manageable pace. I would not recommend moving countries just before a pandemic as an assimilation strategy, but the enforced slowness of that period was not without its uses.

What I found once the world reopened was a professional and social environment that suited me in ways the US had not quite managed. The pace of life is slower and the culture less relentlessly competitive. Work-life balance is treated as a genuine value rather than an aspiration that is honoured in rhetoric and violated in practice. The social contract between employer and employee, and between the individual and the state, is more reciprocal — the taxes are higher, the wages for professional work are lower than in comparable US roles, and the material ceiling is less dramatic. But the floor is also higher: quality of life at the lower end of the income distribution is materially better than in the US, and the absence of certain anxieties such as healthcare costs, around basic provision such as freedom from the compulsion to own a car, changes the texture of daily life in ways that are easy to underestimate until you have experienced both systems.

The entrepreneurial culture, which is sometimes assumed to be weaker in the UK than in the US, is more alive than it appears from the outside, particularly in the life sciences and technology sectors. It is simply quieter about itself, which is consistent with the broader cultural register. US still has a clear advantage when it comes to scaling your business into the higher echelons of market cap and prestige but at the startup level, UK provides an amazingly solid ecosystem for founders, and its income tax structure heavily disincentivises continuing to grow one’s salary income after a certain point with the side-effect of pushing more people into entrepreneurship at an earlier stage in their career.

Settling is not the same as assimilating

For a lot of people moving abroad for study or work, the move is an open-ended bet on their career and future life. Among those moving from a less economically developed country to a more developed one, only a small proportion have a definite plan to return to their home country after a certain amount of time spent living abroad. For everyone else, the process of assimilating into the new country is like an omnipresent cloud hanging over them from the moment they set foot there. Being functional in a culture — able to navigate its institutions, meet its professional expectations, and conduct a normal life within it — can happen relatively quickly, especially if there is no language barrier to overcome. Still, actually belonging to it is a different matter, and the gap between the two is where most of the interesting and difficult work of international relocation takes place.

The moment I most associate with that shift — in both the US and the UK —was filing my first tax return in each country. There is something in the act of filing your taxes, a formal declaration that you share in the obligations of the society, that you are a participant in its systems rather than a guest passing through them, that marks a genuine psychological threshold. It is a mundane moment but it carries a weight that I suspect anyone who has made a similar journey will recognise: the feeling of having crossed from temporary to permanent, from visitor to stakeholder.

What accelerates assimilation, in my experience, is less about deliberate cultural study and more about genuine participation — in professional communities, in local life, in the ordinary routines that accumulate into a sense of place. The cross-disciplinary student organisations I joined in the US, the professional networks I built in the UK, the gradual accumulation of shared references, shared frustrations, and shared context with the people around me: these were what moved the needle rather than a deliberate attempt at cultural integration. It is also worth saying plainly that the timeline is longer than most people expect and that underestimating it leads to unnecessary anxiety. Feeling like an outsider six months in is not a sign that the move was wrong. It is a sign that the process is underway. The honest expectation is years, not months and accepting that at the outset makes the intervening period considerably more navigable.

The country you end up in

The country you arrive in and the country you eventually belong to are related but not identical. The former is the place you researched, applied to, and moved to. The latter is assembled gradually from the specific people you meet, the particular professional environment you inhabit, the neighbourhood you settle in, the routines that become yours. That assembled version is more personal and more specific than any general account of a country's culture can capture, which is part of why the advice that matters most in this process tends to be the kind that is tailored to your situation rather than drawn from a general guide. If you have recently moved to a new country, remember that your aspirations and your anxieties are two sides of the same coin – one represents the opportunity and the other the fear that stem from the novel and the unknown. Cherish them both, as together they can give your life a sense of purpose and fulfilment that is almost impossible to obtain if you never leave home.