Brain Drain and Leaving Home to Study

Jo Hunter Adams

I want to challenge the notion that getting excellent training is the best way to contribute to one's home country. If my objective is to get skills to return home with, those skills should be concrete and readily translatable. There is something important to be learned by being invested in your home. Being away quickly became an investment in myself, and not in the purpose I left with. It quickly becomes grounds for arrogance.

I don't believe I am unique in this. Preparing, and working hard involves a tremendous amount of adaptation to a new environment. The skills you get are not the skills you want. You begin to think globally, but the way you thought before was important too, and you can't go back to that. Most important, work and study overseas is life, and you are changed by it. You are not only learning new things, you are putting down new roots and becoming a different person.

Studying about the whole world, as one does in the US, separates you from the colleagues you want to work with later in your career. And you are, in a very real way, closely tied to another community: a community that has no geographical roots, and no sense of investments in problems that you know well. You look outwards and analyze, rather than inwards, to think in a down-to-earth way.

We have forgotten that the right to critique a society in a valid and helpful way depends on our participation and investment in that society.