Question: What was it like working at the University of Virginia?

Louise Johnson answered on 22 Jun 2010:

Very good fun, and I learned so much!

The university is in a town called Charlottesville in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When I was first thinking about going there, I looked up the local newspaper on the web. The front page headlines were “Dog sanctuary may become dog and cat sanctuary”, “Librarian retires” and “Fluvanna County to get first sewer” so I knew it wasn’t going to be bright lights, big city! The wildlife and scenery were stunning though – hummingbirds, deer, vultures, raccoons – and that’s just the animals that came into the garden.

The best things were that the people were so much fun and so welcoming – it’s easier to make friends when people don’t have that British reserve thing going on – and there was more money around, so you could take more chances with your experiments and it didn’t matter so much if things didn’t work out.

The worst thing was poison ivy. We did quite a bit of field work, and after you’d been working in the hedgerows you had to scrub yourself with special soap or you’d come out in hideous weeping itchy sores.

The American education system is very different – you don’t decide what subject to take (“major in”) for your degree until about halfway through it. You don’t end up with quite as much specialist knowledge, but if you’re into science, you still have to take courses in arts, and vice versa. I sometimes think that’s a better way than ours, which puts people in boxes very early and builds barriers between subject areas. One of my friends over there had studied ecology, French surrealist poetry and Arabic language!

Writing this has made me all nostalgic. I might have to bake a pecan pie and mix myself a mint julep when I get home.