>>11631360>could you give us a little more detail on the path you took?Sure.
A fellow PhD student had gotten a fellowship in Japan, so After I did my PhD I looked into doing the same. It took time, so I did some minor software jobs in industry and a one year post doc at a national defence lab. Then I finally got my application approved and pretty immediately went to Japan on a 2 year STA Fellowship. This is now replaced by a different system:
https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-ippan/index.htmlIt was pretty good, they also arranged for accommodation and language school, even a bike for getting to work! This was in the city Tsukuba, about 60 km north-east of Tokyo.
I must have done reasonably well, because at the end of this I was offered a new fellowship. This came as a surprise to me and unfortunately I had already made commitments to return home, and could therefore not accept this new fellowship. If I had I would probably have married a Japanese girl and still be living there.
OK, blogging on, my field was in decline, and shameless academic inbreeding at home meant I could not get a job in academia, and my enormous student debt had to be paid down so I went to industry, electronics, software and now the patent profession. Much of this was poorly paid but it was still a journey worth taking.
