Beyond the systems and the roads and the rules, there is something harder to name. The culture underneath all of it. The way things are done here, which nobody explains because everyone around you already knows it. At La Trobe, I found myself rereading emails to my supervisor three times before sending them. In Nepal, a professor is Sir or Ma’am, always. The relationship carries a weight of respect that shapes every interaction, every question, every piece of written communication. Here, my supervisor was on a first-name basis from day one. Students in seminars challenged ideas directly, confidently, without any of the careful framing I was accustomed to. Intellectual pushback was not considered impolite. It was considered engagement. That shift, small on the surface and significant underneath, took real time to adjust to. My daughter was doing her own version of this, in her classroom, every single day. New country, new school, new friends, new everything. The daily drive to drop her off and pick her up, which had initially felt like one more unfamiliar routine to absorb, became over time the most grounding part of our day. A fixed point in a schedule that was still finding its shape. I want to say something directly to any Nepali graduate reading this who is about to begin, or who is in the middle of that first overwhelming month. The feeling that everything is too much is not a sign that you made the wrong choice. It is a sign that you are in a place that is genuinely larger than where you started. That is the whole point. You did not leave Nepal and travel this far to stay the same size. The first month of a PhD is not a week that resolves into clarity. It is more like the beginning of a long drive on an unfamiliar road. You do not know all the turns yet, the signs do not all make sense yet, and you will almost certainly take a wrong exit at some point. What matters is that you know where you are going. Not the route. The destination. Keep that clear. The rest is navigation. Your “why” has to be that clear. The reason you left, the reason you chose research, the reason you are sitting in a university library in a city that is still becoming yours. That reason must stay visible to you even when everything else is fog. The journey will humble you. It will surprise you and detour you and occasionally knock you sideways on the driveway. But if the destination stays in focus, the arrow will fly. It always does. For every International student who packed their ambition into suitcases and boarded a flight toward something larger than themselves, this one is for you. Learning the Culture Nobody Wrote Down THE ROAD AND THE RESEARCH BY BINAYA KANDEL The Overwhelm is not the Problem 8
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