Greece: Summary of Interview with Dr. Antonios Anastasopoulos
Introduction
Dr. Antonios Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at George Mason University. He was born and raised in Greece, where he moved between Athens and a small local village where his family lived. Dr. Anastasopoulos completed his primary, secondary, and undergraduate education in Athens before moving to the United States to complete his PhD in 2014. He received his BSc/ MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2014 at the National Technical University of Athens. After moving to the United States, he completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 at the University of Notre Dame. After completing his PhD, he worked as a Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University for almost two years before moving to George Mason University. He has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University since August 2020. He shared that he wishes more people understood that immigration is “often not a choice” and that “even if you're immigrating to be a professor at the top institution, that doesn't make it any easier…that [it] is…still hard.”
Reasons for Moving
Dr. Anastasopoulos moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in Computer Science. He had applied for a variety of different PhD programs around the world, but in the end, he went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He said:
“I only came here for my PhD. In fact…I had a backup offer to go somewhere in Europe, but then the guy that I really wanted to work with admitted me, so I was like, sure, I'll go move over to Indiana to work with you.
I did get rejected from all the PhD programs I applied to, and my advisor found my application at the reject pile at USC and was like, Hey, I'm going to Notre Dame, would you be interested in a PhD there? … [I asked] are you going to Paris? He was like, no, no, no. It's a small Catholic university in Indiana… I googled it and I was like, sure.”
Perceptions of the United States
Before moving to the United States for his PhD, Dr. Anastasopoulos had briefly experienced the country by visiting when he was younger. He was also comfortable with the United States because he knew people in the United States or who had at least been here before, and had perceptions about the United States before arriving. He said:
“There's the ... outside perception of the US as an imperialistic kind of superpower, which when you come from a small country that has potentially suffered from that because of the dictatorship and everything, it's … a negative perception. At the same time, there's a lot of the positive perception when you think of the educational perspective, which all the best institutions are here…The reason I decided to apply to do PhDs in the US was… [because] I visited Harvard and MIT and Columbia…It seem[ed] like a perfect place to do research and that's what I want to do….and hence the decision to actually try and do that. Now when it comes to actual life, I mean I had seen New York and Boston before as a tourist before coming here. So, I had a little bit of the tourist experience of that.”
Dr. Anastasopoulos also discussed how the way he viewed the United States as a whole before arriving was different than what he expected life in Indiana to be like. He recalled:
“A small town in the Midwest, I was thinking it was … going to be somewhere between an ideal idealistic college town [where] they [students] could just stay on campus, beautiful buildings, gardens and students and everything's fine … I honestly did not know what I was expecting for Indiana specifically, because it was a big unknown. All I knew was that I was going to a decent school that provided me enough money to survive and had a great environment to do research. And I was like, we're going to figure out everything else later.”
In addition to the aspects of life in the United States that Dr. Anastasopoulos had been anticipating before arriving here, he shared things that surprised him after having been in the United States for some time:
“The amount of people who think more… individualistically than as society as a whole, the amount of libertarians is astonishing to me. But also, at the same time, the freedom to discuss things that in Europe we considered settled … We just never grew up discussing abortion or things like that… I think maybe the thing that contributed to that was the fact that I was at a Catholic university, the University of Notre Dame. So even though I'm not Catholic, these issues of human rights and civil rights, including, for example, abortion and religious rights and all that were quite prevalent. That was something that I did not expect … [I was] surprised [by] the fact that there's still room for debate. There's still room for dissent and different opinions, and it's not like, you know, learn what you learned in school and that's it; That that's the truth, period.”
Challenges
Since moving to the United States, Dr. Anastasopoulos says that his biggest challenges as an immigrant was navigating and obtaining required documents. He discussed how others saw the situation and how the system could be inaccessible. He said:
“The biggest challenge… [was that at] some point my visa expired. It was a pain to get it renewed. I ended up getting in[to] the country without a [renewed] visa. Somehow, I straight talked my way through, even though I wasn't even supposed to be let on a plane. But then the biggest challenge was kind of just applying for the green card. That was painful, but it happened.”
He also shared the skepticism that he has encountered about the validity of his relationship and marriage to his U.S. citizen wife:
“There have been questions … about my marriage from extended family… [telling my wife] ‘be careful they don't want to get married [to you as a U.S. citizen] just for the green card’ … this is what my [U.S. citizen] wife was told when we started dating and stuff like that.”
Accomplishments and Future Aspirations
Since moving to the United States Dr. Anastasopoulos has achieved many things: from receiving his PhD to the work he has done in his career as a professor as well as outside of a university setting:
“Completing a PhD and getting a job as faculty is kind of a big deal that I'm really proud of …I'm also very proud of some of the actual work that I'm doing. I'm working with some indigenous communities in Chile building language technologies for them… the whole story is kind of nice…Starting from being rejected from all the PhD places I applied to, being a professor is… maybe the thing that I'm most proud of. That and my son, who…understands three languages.”
In the future, Dr. Anastasopoulos aspires to further the work he is already doing and spend more time with his family. He said:
“The immediate goal is tenure. Eventually I would like to do more impactful work…In the further future… I would like to … find a way to spend more time in Europe, not necessarily Greece, although Greece would be better, of course - like South Europe, just in terms of quality of life and all. I would eventually [want] …to at least spend a bigger chunk of the year there, mostly for my family and for me.”
Message About Immigration
To wrap up the interview, Dr. Anastasopoulos shared how polarization in the United States complicated his feelings of belonging in the United States:
“The very weird thing that I find is there's a portion of the US that is extremely welcoming and understanding, and there's a portion of the US that is the opposite. [That] can be very hard, can be extremely frustrating. Cause it's like, I'm paying my taxes, right?...But I've had experiences in Tennessee… where we're meeting someone like, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm here for school’. Cause it was the time I was [getting my] PhD. He was like, ‘Oh, how long are you going to be here?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know, forever. I'm dating an American now. I want to marry her…[and]I'm contributing to this society.”
He also highlighted how he wished people understood that migration is usually not a choice and that everyone’s situation is different. He said:
“It's often not a choice… even for educated folks like me, if you want to do something with your life, you just have to leave from some places, even if they're pretty touristic destinations like Greece…It's extremely hard…even if you're immigrating to be a professor at the top institution, that doesn't make it any easier. I mean, that [it] is just still hard.”
You can learn more about Dr. Antonios Anastasopoulos here.