How to Actually Become a Marine Biologist Outside the United States

 

I get some version of this message a couple of times a month:

"I don't know what to do next, but I want to live outside the US and study marine biology."

That's the whole message. No plan, no topic, no country. Just someone who knows they want out and doesn't know what out looks like. I don’t blame them. The US tends to be elitist with its academia and research, but doesn’t have enough opportunities anymore (even less with this current mindless administration).

I was that person in 2020. I had a bachelor's in marine biology, a 2.7 GPA, and a dead end job. Now I have a PhD from Kyoto University that somebody else paid for and have been interviewing for permanent research positions here in Japan. I don’t have the job yet, but I have a good feeling about it.

This is the long version of how that happened, with the actual emails, the actual numbers, and the actual timeline. It's long because the short version is useless. Take my experience and try to make it work for you.

TL;DR: Pick the research, not the country. Read 50 papers until you find a gap. Email the first author of the paper you loved most, with a real question about their paper, not a request to be their student. Follow up once after a week. Send 5 or 6 of these at a time. Expect a 3% hit rate. A publication beats a GPA. Your American field certifications are worth more abroad than they are at home. Save money if you can, and if you can't, don't get on the plane until funding is confirmed.

 

1. Why leaving is a real answer and not a consolation prize

The ocean does not stop at a border. The water moves, the larvae move, the fish move, the plastic sure as hell moves. But every country on the planet manages its own slice of that water completely differently. Different laws, different money, different priorities, different ideas about what a healthy fishery even is. You end up with ecosystems that are ecologically damn near identical and managed in ways that have nothing to do with each other.

That gap is not an obstacle to studying marine systems. It is one of the most interesting things in the entire field. And you cannot see it from inside one country.

So this isn't about fleeing. There's a real intellectual reason to go, and it happens to also be the practical one.

2. The trap you're probably already in

If you're American and you want to do marine research, here's the machine you're stuck in.

The entry level job is seasonal field work. Three to nine months. You go out, you collect highly specialized data, you get very good at one specific thing, and then the contract ends and you get dropped. Then you work retail, or you bartend, or you do whatever, until the next hiring cycle opens.

And here's the fucked up part. Those jobs are cited as how you get the field experience that qualifies you for long term positions. So the only road to stability runs directly through years of instability. I have watched friends do this. Genuinely talented people living with real financial insecurity, chasing experience they already have.

I applied every year for three years. Every year the answer was that I didn't have enough experience. In between I worked five or six part time and full time jobs, none of them related to anything I cared about, just to make rent until the next cycle.

Then COVID hit and I finally had time to sit still and think.

Meanwhile, here is what nobody tells you: the field experience you pick up as an American undergrad travels extraordinarily well. It is worth more abroad than it is at home.

My dive training is the concrete example. When I got to Japan, my certifications exceeded those of my peers and, in some cases, my superiors. Not because anyone there was less capable, but because the US has a specific pipeline for scientific diving that produces a specific kind of diver, and I came out of it. That one thing made me an asset from about week one. It still does. My professor created a part time research assistant position specifically so I could keep diving with him this coming winter, because that capability is not easy to replace. In the US, divers are a dime a dozen and everyone wants those field jobs.

Would I have made it in the US eventually? Honestly, no. After enough rejections I was looking seriously at a commercial diving school in Santa Barbara, planning to convert the dive skills I'd built doing science into something that would actually pay. I was close. Short term the money could have been nice. Long term I'd have hated it, the same way I hated every job I took to stay afloat, and it's mostly oil rig work, and I didn't want to spend my body helping oil companies make more money.

I didn't enroll, because a warm email came back from a Japanese professor.

3. Pick the research, not the country

Almost everyone gets this backwards. They choose a country and then go looking for research in it. Do the opposite.

I was not Japan obsessed. I was research obsessed, and the research I wanted lived in Japan.

Specifically, artificial reefs. Japan has been investing in artificial reef technology and publishing it since the 1970s. They deploy them commercially, at scale, as ordinary fisheries infrastructure, while the United States is somehow still arguing about whether they work at all. Looking at the fish stocks, at a country far more dependent on seafood than any other, with relatively stable catch populations, my read was that somebody over there had figured something out.

I read the famous American artificial reef papers, followed them into the Japanese literature, and fell into a rabbit hole. There were decades of legacy research sitting there.

So the instruction is: find the research first, and let it tell you the country. It scales all the way down. You don't need a national obsession.

Where people forget to look: everyone defaults to Australia, the UK, Germany. I have met outstanding academics doing astounding work in Indonesia and the Philippines. This is not a first world thing. The research is where the research is. Its possible you could end up not enjoying a country as much because you are working on research you don’t care for.

Can you do this at 18?

You can, it's just harder, and the reason is structural. Undergraduate programs in most countries are typically taught in the local language. That's not a foreign thing. Hell the US only has English programs to my knowlage. But graduate science is different, because publishing happens in English. Your colleagues need English. Your lab needs English. As a graduate student you arrive holding something they actually want. At 18 you mostly don't.

4. Have a research topic, but not too much of one

You'll hear advice, that you should arrive with a fleshed out research topic. That's half right, and the wrong half will cost you.

The actual shape is: your proposal should be broad, and your specific intentions come out later, once a mutual connection exists.

What I brought to my professor was that I wanted to understand Japanese artificial reefs. How they're designed, how they're implemented, why. A big fuzzy abstract (but not really) thing. He took it and helped me refine it into specific, executable projects. That's what a good advisor does. They take an idea and turn it into an experiment that can actually be run in the water, with a boat and a budget and a timeline. That refinement happened over months of email, not in one message.

If you arrive with something too narrow, you've left your advisor no room to work. They can't shape it, they can't fund it, and there's a decent chance it doesn't match what the lab can physically do.

Where a topic comes from if you don't have one

You read. That's the entire method and I'm not going to dance around it.

For me it was 50 to 60 papers. I started with the well known American artificial reef literature, followed it into the Japanese work, and kept going. The technique is citation chaining: find a claim in a paper that resonates with you, look at what they cited to support it, go read that. Repeat. You end up somewhere nobody sent you, which is the point.

Read until you find a gap.

And here's the thing about the gap I eventually built a career on. I didn't find it alone. I read enough to walk in and ask a real question, which was: why did this research slow down? My professor came back and said there were evaluation gaps, and that his recent eDNA work suggested you could go back and reevaluate those reefs with new tools.

That became my whole PhD thesis. It grew over time starting with a small email exchange, because I'd read enough to ask something worth answering.

5. Find someone senior who will back you for free

This is the part I almost always leave out, and it might be the most important thing here.

During those wilderness years, while I was occasionally fucking around, getting rejected from seasonal jobs, I was still doing my own research. Unfunded. Just diving whenever I could afford to and recording what I saw. And I had Milton Love in my corner.

Milton is a fish ecologist at UCSB's Marine Science Institute who has spent a career on offshore structures and what lives on them. He gave me no money. What he gave me was his attention. He read my ideas and told me whether they were interesting. When I brought him a novel observation, a newly recorded agonistic behavior in a criminally underdescribed fish, Alloclinus holderi, filmed while diving at Anacapa Island, he coauthored it with me and helped me submit it for peer review.

That's it. That's the whole intervention. And it changed my life, because that paper is what got me into graduate school with a 2.7 GPA.

Small, novel findings like that happen constantly and most people have no idea where to report them. An emeritus professor with a bit of spare time is exactly the right person to help you place one. What that paper proved, all at once, was that I had independent drive, that I wanted to do research badly enough to do it for free on a shoestring, and that I could write a scientific paper. No statistics in it. Pure behavioral observation. Didn't matter. Still a first author publication.

Two key things from this.

First: it cost him nothing. A read of an idea. A journal suggestion. Ten minutes here and there. Senior people can hand you an enormous amount at almost zero cost to themselves, and the overwhelming majority of students never ask. You should ask. The worst case is silence, which is probably where you already are.

Second, and this is the subtle one: Milton was not enthusiastic about me going abroad. It wasn’t a traditional academic path, which might have been insanely more difficult in previous years. He backed it anyway. Wrote me a very nice letter of recommendation as well.

Do not require your mentor to endorse your plan. Their job is not to validate your life choices, and if you only listen to people who agree with your plan you will get a very narrow and very flattering picture of the world. What you want from a mentor is honest engagement with the work. Milton's ambivalence and sometimes pushback was itself useful information, and his support of the research was real regardless of what he thought of the relocation.

6. Finding the supervisor

I did not cold email my professor straight away

I read a paper on artificial timber reefs. I contacted the first author directly, a student named Jamaluddin Fitrah Alam, who goes by Jamal, with real follow up questions about his paper and a light hint that I was looking to continue my education.

Jamal warmly answered my questions and connected me to Professor Yoh Yamashita, who told me he was retiring and referred me on to Reiji Masuda.

Three steps, and the first one was to a student, not a professor.

That matters, because students answer their email and professors sometimes do not. And a referral from inside the lab arrives with a weight a cold email will never have.

The numbers, so you don't quit

I started cold emailing in May 2020. I sent 20 to 30 emails to professors and authors across Japan. I got my first real traction in July, and the conversation that mattered started in August.

Three months of near total silence. Call it a 3 to 5% hit rate.

Cold emails do not work instantly. They work eventually, on someone, and you cannot predict who.

The follow up that saved everything

I sent Masuda a long, research heavy email. Nothing came back. A week or so later I sent a short, warm follow up.

When he finally replied, the first thing he said was that he'd missed my first email and had certainly read it now.

He wasn't ignoring me. He lost it in his inbox. That is the entire margin between the life I have and the one where I'm welding on an oil rig.

Most people read silence as rejection and stop. Don't be most people.

Evaluating someone from 8,000 km away

I read the lab page. I read his back catalog. I noticed he was a serious diver, which resonated with me immediately, and I used that as the angle to sell myself as a student who could be genuinely useful to him.

I also contacted a current student in the lab. Honestly it mostly confirmed what was already public, but I'd still do it every time, and I'd extend it beyond students. Talk to postdocs. Talk to other faculty. They'll tell you about lab culture, which you cannot read off a website and which will determine whether you'll be happy in that place.

Green flags and red flags

Green flag: the reply continues the conversation. A polite brush off acknowledges your questions and stops. Masuda gave me an actual research direction and encouraged me to write a review paper on the subject. He was inviting me to do more work. That's someone willing to invest.

Only after a couple weeks of back and forth did I ask about becoming a master's student, and by then it was heavily implied.

Red flag: no engagement with your interests. I emailed another Japanese researcher about artificial reefs and studying in his lab, and what I got back was a list of papers to read. Nothing about what I was trying to do.

That might suit somebody else fine. My read was that I'd get boxed into his agenda instead of mine. Some professors want a warm body for next year and will steer you into their preferred topic. Someone genuinely passionate about a question will work harder and go further on it, so a supervisor who entertains your topic and shapes it into something feasible is a green flag. One who hands you their topic on day one is not.

7. The email

Here's the actual email that got me a PhD, verbatim, typo included.

Subject: Questions regarding ARs/Research in Japan

Hello Professor Masuda,

My name's Hunter and I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a BS in Marine Biology. I'm studying artificial reefs and their efficacy in fisheries restoration as well as their effect on the marine environment. The United States has very little AR research and I was seeking opportunities elsewhere when I found the AR history in Japan. I've been fascinated by how much research and reports have been published surrounding ARs and want to learn more about current research trends. I heard about you through a recently published article about Artificial Timber Reefs in Water and talking with Jamaluddin Fitrah Alam, author of this paper. To which Professor Yoh Yamashita referred me to you as well as your paper on wooden ARs.

I talked with Jamaluddin Fitrah Alam and he answered my questions about wooden AR's very well. This, along with reading your paper from 2005, has really peaked my interest in wooden AR's, a side of which I had not yet considered. I am currently conducting my own research and have some key research factors I wanted to investigate in ARs further. This may run contradictory to the ideals of fishermen and maritime, but I've wanted to investigate the vertical factor of artificial reefs and its effect on the success of an artificial reef. This is of course in reference to the oil platforms being incredibly productive. I would hope to learn more about ecosystem modeling utilizing nutrient levels.

Do you think (after Covid presumably) there are labs in Japan that would fund or are currently researching this side of ARs, or be open to letting a US national be a part of any research surrounding ARs? I'm looking to really study an area of marine biology/ecology that I find most interesting but there is so little opportunity in the US that is in temperate waters and deals with design of ARs rather than "what trash can we throw away that will make it seem like we aren't littering" mentality. I have a passion for this area of study and would be happy just being a part of any ongoing research.

Lastly, I heard you study marine animal Ethology. I just recently recorded agonistic behavior by two Alloclinus holderi while I was taking videos diving at Anacapa island. I currently have that paper in review but would love to hear more about your findings or how you survey animal behavior.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I would love to connect and talk about artificial reefs further with you. I understand you're a diver so, if possible, I would very much want to dive on AR's when I visit Japan once COVID settles down.

Six things.

1.     I named specific papers. Not "I see you work on artificial reefs." The actual papers, with links or PDFs.

2.     I named the person who referred me, in the first paragraph. That converts a cold email into a warm one instantly.

3.     I asked a question I could only ask having read the thing. This is the whole game. A professor will brush off "I'm very interested in your work" without blinking. Ask about a specific finding in a specific paper of theirs and you become a person instead of a form letter. It does not have to be a brilliant question. It only has to prove you read the whole paper and kept thinking about it afterward.

4.     I disclosed my own work. I had a paper in review. I said it.

5.     I offered something that cost him nothing and interested him a lot. He's a diver, I'm a diver, let's go dive when I planned to travel to Japan.

6.     I asked about the funding landscape without asking him for money. Asking whether labs in a country fund this kind of work is a normal professional question, and if it's a good fit your advisor will start pointing you at MEXT or the local equivalent unprompted. Asking a stranger to pay for you in email one reads as desperate and ends the conversation.

Attachments: No CV, no transcript, no resume. Just the body with hyperlinks. If you have the PDFs for the papers in question, great. As long as it’s findable on Google Scholar or something.

The follow up

Hello Professor Masuda,

Hope you are doing well. Just following up to see if you've gotten my previous email. Everything's busy and up in the air with COVID and all but I would still love to connect sometime and talk more about research interests. Your resume and publications are very impressive and I would really like to learn more about what you are trying to study currently and if there are any ways I could help with the research (now or in the future).

I'm also truly enamored with the history and reputation of Maizuru Fisheries Research Station and am so impressed with its collection, history, and facilities. It would be a dream of mine to work at a place like that.

It doesn't ask for anything. It's short, it's warm, it compliments the institution, and it leaves the door open. It is not a nag. That's the difference between following up and pestering someone.

Mechanics

●       Follow up once about a week after the cold email. Once more two weeks after that. If the second gets nothing, move on and don't take it personally.

●       Run 5 or 6 at a time with different professors. People worry about this because professors know each other. Don't. Everyone understands a prospective student is shopping for fit, and nobody expects anything from you until a commitment is made. When I settled on Masuda sensei, I immediately emailed the other professor to say I was going a different direction, and that was the end of it. No bad blood, ever.

●       Language. I wrote in English and Masuda reads and writes perfect English, so I got lucky. But email translation now is essentially universal and writing to a lab in the local language is more viable than it has ever been. If you do it, say you used a translator. Don't fake a fluency you don't have.

Honestly, in every Reddit conversation I've had about this, nobody has ever sent me a draft email to look over. Because almost nobody knows that emailing is the move at all. A well written personal email will get you more than anything else you can possibly do.

8. Money, visas, and the real timeline

The calendar:

●       May 2020 — start cold emailing. Roughly three months of silence.

●       August 2020 — Masuda and I start talking. That conversation runs for months.

●       January 2021 — I submit my grad school application.

●       February to March 2021 — acceptance letter.

●       October 2021 — official enrollment, classes by Zoom, because of the Rona. Tuition was halved for that reason and I kept working in the States saving more money.

●       March 2022 — I actually get on the plane.

Almost two years from first email to standing in the lab, and a chunk of that was pandemic specific. But the six months between his first reply and my application was not wasted time. That was the most important part of the whole process.

The money:

●       Tuition: ~$4,000 USD per year

●       Rent with all utilities, internet, phone, everything: ~¥70,000 per month

●       I moved with ~$25,000 saved, and it covered the entire master's degree

We're lucky in America to be holding one of the strongest currencies on earth right now, and most graduate marine programs are at remote research stations out in the countryside, which stretches it further. I was in a fishing town, not central Tokyo.

I was permitted to work 28 hours a week on a student visa. I never used it. Part of that was the low cost of living and part was community: friends gave me fresh produce, friends who ran bars gave me drinks. That was supplementary, not sustainable, and I want to be clear about that, because "make friends and you'll eat" is not a financial plan. But it does say something about what you find out there.

The PhD was fully funded through an internal Kyoto University research fellowship. My professor told me to apply for it. That's the pattern to take away: your advisor is the single most valuable funding resource you will ever have. They know which programs exist, which fit your situation, and which you'll actually win. In Japan the answer everyone knows is MEXT, but there are half a dozen other routes and your advisor knows which apply to you. And if they want to keep you, they will help you find the money.

Visa: student visa in, student visa through the PhD. Cut and dry. The university handled almost all the paperwork and will tell you the forms and documents you’ll need.

Entrance exam: there wasn't one, not the way Americans imagine. It was a standard application with a detailed research plan, and Masuda helped me write that plan. Your advisor knows what the university wants to see, and their personal recommendation carries more weight than anything else in the file. More than grades, more than test scores.

Do you need a cash cushion? It helps enormously. If you don't have one, you need confirmation of funding before you move, meaning MEXT or an equivalent secured as enrollment begins. Professors are flexible and will advise you based on your situation. But do not get on a plane hoping it works out.

9. What you bring that they actually want

Two things made me valuable from the beginning, and neither one was a grade.

Diving

I showed up with somewhere between 150 and 200 logged dives and, more importantly, the right certifications: NAUI instructor and AAUS scientific diver.

Japan has an occupational diving license, the 潜水士 (sensuishi), with a written exam. As far as the prefecture office told me, I was the first person in Kyoto Prefecture cleared without taking that exam. They looked at my AAUS card and cleared me for research diving. No written test, no practical, no medical, no fee. Just a copy of the card. The AAUS certification specifically was what carried the weight, and I suspect that set a precedent for AAUS divers in Japan. At least in Kyoto Prefecture.

A credential I earned as an American undergrad translated directly into a national professional qualification somewhere else, for free.

English, with an asterisk

I started doing English editing before I'd even been accepted. Another student asked me to review her manuscript. It might have been an informal test. I took it seriously either way, the paper got published, and I ended up in the acknowledgements. That's a tactic you can steal: offer to look at a manuscript before you're anybody. Everyone in my lab knows they can ask me for an English review and I’m happy to do it.

Has AI eaten that job? Possibly. Manuscript editing is much less scarce than it was in 2021. Still, some people will prefer the human touch to editing rather than the machine.

But it has not touched the part that matters, which is academic presentations. Most people can get a manuscript into decent English with a machine. What they cannot do is stand up at an international conference without their stomach doing loops faster than a Six Flags ride. Presentation anxiety is not a text problem. A native speaker coaching someone through a conference talk is worth an enormous amount, and so is being the person who'll sit down and talk it through, because plenty of researchers want an in-person human to help them work out what they're actually trying to say.

Build before you go

R, absolutely. Python is also great to know. I can almost guarantee you will need to work with statistics and atleast having a base knowledge of this kind of statistical coding will save you from headaches later.  

Any formal certification, diving, boating, whatever. Your advisor will tell you what's useful for your specific project, and anything you arrive already holding is pure upside. Nothing you learn is a detriment.

What didn't matter: my shitty undergraduate GPA. It never came up. A strong advisor recommendation plus a publication simply outweighed it.

10. What nobody warns you about

Reading versus speaking are completely different problems. I speak conversationally. I cannot really read Japanese (maybe a menu at an izakaya but that’s it). Early on I'd ask students or professors to confirm details for me. But with machine translation I can now work through Japanese publications going back to the 1980s, and correspondence is almost all email, which is easily translatable. This barrier has mostly collapsed, and I'd guess that's true for most languages now.

Language socially is a different story. I arrived knowing three phrases: トイレはどこですか(where's the bathroom), ビールをお願いします(beer please), and お勧めは何ですか(what do you recommend). That's it. Two years of immersion later I was basically self sufficient. It comes slowly, but it eventually comes. There are moments in that window where you might feel genuinely helpless, and that's real, but it's mostly a first-two-years problem. I imagine this is true for most languages.

Advising style. Masuda is mostly hands off and supportive. I designed essentially all my own projects, with one exception. We met about monthly to work out next steps. Before I even arrived in Japan, I was sending him biweekly emails detailing my independent research. Some people need more structure than that, and if you're one of them, know it about yourself and screen for it. But understand the incentive: the more independent you are as a researcher, the more attractive you are as a prospective student.

Culture. I was probably too abrasive early on, which does not land well in Asian workplaces. I've since toned it down and learned to code switch. That took about two years, same as everything else.

Bureaucracy. Residence cards, banking, phone contracts, housing. All of it is a pain in the ass everywhere on earth and there's no clever trick. One piece of real advice: bring every document you own. Originals. Birth certificate, diplomas, transcripts, certification cards, all of it. You will be asked for something absurd at some point and you want it in the folder. It’s a headache for a little while but as you get established, these issues become less and less.

Family and community. I gave up familiarity with my community, and that was shorter lived than I expected. I like the community I have in Japan more than what I had in the States. I miss my family, obviously, but I get to see them on FaceTime regularly, I go back sometimes, they come here sometimes. It's a manageable distance now. My Mother might disagree though.

What would I do differently? Nothing. There were hiccups. Sure. All of them were manageable. Getting here mattered more than getting here perfectly.

11. What to do right now

Read five papers. Pick the one you connect with most. Email the first author.

Email them with research questions, not prospective student questions. Start a dialogue. Ask about the science. The "can I be your student" question comes later, after there's a repertoire established. You don’t want to come across as desperate.

And if you're sitting there thinking you've missed your window, because you graduated three years ago, or your GPA was bad, or you're thirty and working retail:

It's never too late, but starting now beats waiting. If you're unhappy in the work you're doing, why not try to do the thing you actually want. Countries are adaptable. Customs are adaptable. You are more adaptable than you think.

The feeling of purpose is not adaptable. You either have it or you don't.

Follow your ikigai. I did, and I don't regret a single day I've spent on this path. It's been hard... but it's been much less hard than sitting one more day in a job I despised.