Three Years...

Today marks three years since my first day as a Professor at UNC Charlotte. I arrived in the city a couple of days earlier, but that is not the date that stuck. What stuck is walking into a building where almost nobody knew me, in an almost empty office and with no real idea what I was doing. I remember thinking how beautiful the campus is. I remember the doubt.

People ask me if I miss Portugal. Of course I do. I miss going out for an unplanned beer at the end of the day. I miss coffee that costs less than a dollar and arrives in thirty seconds. I miss my colleagues, some of whom I have known for longer than my students have been alive. Above all, I miss my family and my friends; they know that, but this post is not about them (if it were, it would be made of tears). None of this is a secret, and none of it is a complaint. It is just saudade, doing what saudade does.

But if I am honest, and this post is supposed to be honest, the last three years were not mostly about missing things. Somewhere in the middle of the mess I found something I had not felt in a very long time: I was the newcomer again. Not a junior, exactly, but a newcomer all the same. In Coimbra I was the person who had been there forever, who knew where “the bodies were buried”, whom people asked. Here nobody asked me anything. I had to learn how things work from scratch, ask the obvious questions, get things wrong in public. I expected to hate it. Instead, I felt younger. It turns out I had missed not knowing.

So here is a three-year check-in, written mostly for myself and for the friends back home who keep asking. What changed, what surprised me, what let me down, and what I still cannot make sense of.

What changed

The thing I would have bet against three years ago: I changed the focus of my research. Not completely. I am still the same person who spent twenty-five years asking whether a system can be trusted, but the systems changed under my feet. I arrived just as it was becoming clear that generative AI was not a passing curiosity. I was setting up an office and a new research lab, trying to understand what a 401(k) was, and at the same time watching my entire field get a new problem dropped on it. I could have ignored it and kept doing what I knew. I probably would have changed direction in Coimbra too, eventually, but a new place, with no routines to defend and no one expecting me to be the person I had always been, made the turn much easier to take. So I followed the interesting question. Most of what I do today, and most of what my students do, comes out of that decision.

I also taught courses I had never taught before, which sounds small, but is not. After two decades of teaching more or less the same things, preparing a class the night before, one chapter ahead of the students, is a very effective cure for whatever confidence you had accumulated. I complained about it a lot. I also learned more in those semesters than in the previous ten.

And I learned that a lot of what I thought was “how things are done” was really “how things are done in Portugal and in Europe”. How you write a proposal. How a meeting ends. How direct you are allowed to be with a student, and how direct they are allowed to be with you. Some of the new ways I adopted quickly. Some I still quietly refuse. I now end many emails with “Best,” like everyone else here, and I still feel a small betrayal every time.

Two universities, seven centuries apart

Coimbra was founded in 1290. UNC Charlotte was founded in 1946. I knew that going in and thought it was a curiosity. It is not. It is the single thing that explains most of my working days.

A young university just moves. Things that in Coimbra needed three signatures, a council meeting, and a season of waiting get decided here in a week, sometimes in the same conversation where they were raised. And there are people, actual people with offices, whose job is to deal with the paperwork so that I do not have to. The first time an administrator told me, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle that,” I did not believe her. She handled it. I am still a little moved by this.

What I lost is harder to explain to someone who has not lived it. In Coimbra I knew everybody. Not just names: I knew who was working on what, whose grant was in trouble, whose student was about to defend, who you could count on in a hard committee. Twenty-five years buys you that. Here, three years in, I walk past colleagues in the corridor whose research I could not describe to you. It is not that people are cold: they have been nothing but welcoming, and nobody is to blame. It is partly the size of the place, partly that I spend my days with my head down, and partly that twenty-five years cannot be rebuilt in three. The people I do know here I know well, and I count several of them as friends already. But the wide, loose web of knowing everyone a little takes time to grow, and I am still growing it. I miss the coffee-break gossip more than I expected to. It was not gossip, really. It was how the department thought.

My PhD students are, oddly, the part that changed least. They are all international, one of them Portuguese, one German, so advising them feels much like advising in Coimbra did: the same long conversations, the same doubts at year two. I also kept my Coimbra students. I still advise them, across five time zones, and I intend to until the last one defends. Where I do notice a difference is in the master’s students. There is more pressure on them here, more anxiety about the job market, more counting of the months until graduation. I see it in the questions they ask at the end of a class, the ones they were saving. I did not use to get those questions as often.

And then, funding. Everyone told me it would be easier in the US. Everyone. Friends, colleagues, people who had never set foot here. So let me say it plainly for the next person: it was not. I arrived just as the whole system started to tighten, and it has kept tightening, for everyone, not just for the new guy with a Portuguese CV. In Coimbra I had won a good number of national and EU projects and had grown used to it. Here I spent three years writing proposals that went nowhere, and only this year landed my first one, a collaboration with Bank of America. I am happy about it, more than its size justifies. I am also aware that if this post were being written one year earlier, this paragraph would have a very different tone, and I would probably have been too embarrassed to write it.

Life, em suspenso

Outside work, the words that keep coming to me are em suspenso. On hold. Life is good until I open the news, and I have learned not to open the news that often. When your right to be where you are depends on a visa, and the rules around that visa depend on whoever woke up in a bad mood, a small part of your brain never switches off. I plan in shorter horizons than I used to. I say “next summer” with a little less certainty than a man my age should.

I also expected less bureaucracy. Portugal, after all, is famous for it. Well. In my first month in Charlotte, I went to a bank branch, in person, more times than in the previous twenty years in Portugal. Combined. Two days ago, I drove to the NCDOT to renew my driver’s license in person for the second time. That makes five trips to the DMV in three years, counting the ones it took just to get the license in the first place. Five. In Portugal I renewed mine once, online, in the time it takes to make an espresso. I am not bitter, I promise, but I now have a theory: every country has the same amount of bureaucracy; it just puts it in different places. Portugal keeps it at the university. America keeps it at the DMV.

The rhythms are different too, and I have mostly stopped fighting them. Dinner at five, which still feels like a late lunch. No meetings after five in the afternoon. Thanksgiving, which I did not understand the first year and I still don’t. Nobody strolls. I continued strolling anyway, on purpose, a small act of Portuguese resistance.

Then there is the small daily strangeness of thinking in one language and living in another. My English has improved enormously; it had to. The technical English was never the problem; I have been writing papers in it for more than twenty-five years. It is the other English, the one you need at the pharmacy, at the restaurant, at a friend’s place, when someone makes a joke, and everyone laughs half a second before you do. That one is still a work in progress. What I am quietly proud of is the reverse direction: after three years, I still do not let English leak into my Portuguese. No anglicismos. It is a small, pointless act of loyalty, and I take it very seriously.

And food, which is the most honest saudade detector there is. Cooking Portuguese in Charlotte is sometimes a treasure hunt. The ingredients simply are not there, or are there under a different name and a different price. My lifeline is a Brazilian supermarket, where I can find proper bacalhau, and every so often chouriço and paio from Trás-os-Montes, which is when I know it is going to be a good week. I have not converted. Three years in, my kitchen is still Portuguese, and I suspect it is the last thing that ever will be.

And there is one thing I hope I never get used to. The inequality here is not abstract; it is on the sidewalk. If you have money in this country, you can reach things that in Portugal would be out of reach no matter what you did. And if you do not, you can end up sleeping on the street, and a lot of people do, in a city that is doing very well for itself. I pass them on the walk from home to my office. I grew up in a country that is not rich, but where falling that far is harder, where someone would usually catch you. I do not have a clever conclusion here. I only know that the day I stop noticing will be a bad day.

The newest challenge

The newest thing on my plate is the one I am most curious about. I became the Graduate Program Director for our PhD, and my job, in short, is to rebuild a program designed for a different decade. Half the rules assume a student who will spend five years sitting in courses, a great many courses, slowly mastering tools that will stay the same until graduation. My students’ tools change every week, and the courses cannot keep up. Something has to give, and I get to propose what.

What I keep catching myself doing is reaching back to Coimbra for the answer. The long apprenticeship, the idea that advisor and student are in it together for years, the patience with depth. Not all of it belongs here, and some of it honestly should not travel. But maybe a little of it should. Maybe the most useful thing an old university can give a young one is a professor who remembers what the slow way was for. Who knows. I would like to try.

What comes next

I do not know what comes next, and this time I mean it literally, not as a nice way to end a post. The funding situation, the immigration situation, the state of my field, the state of this country, the state of my country: none of it is stable enough to draw a line through. Three years ago I would have found that terrifying. Today I find it only mildly terrifying, which I am choosing to count as progress.

What I do know is that I came here partly to find out what I was made of, and I have some of the answer now. I am made of people, on both sides of the Atlantic, more than I had realized. I am made of a stubbornness that I used to think was Portuguese and now suspect is just mine. And I am made of a set of habits, most of them acquired in a very old city on a hill, that turned out to travel much better than I feared.

Saudade is, on its face, a very past-tense feeling, but, as Adler said, we are pulled by what we are reaching for, not pushed by where we have been. I have come to think the two are not in conflict. Portugal does not pull me backward. It comes with me, quietly, into whatever I choose next.

Three years. Five trips to the DMV. One project, at last. A new research focus, new courses, a PhD program to rebuild, and a city I am still learning to love, slowly. Saudade, sim. Sempre. But also this.