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It is July 2014, India. I’ve just finished presenting the first draft of my PhD thesis to an internal review panel. I have four weeks to sort out administrative and paper work with my university in India. Four weeks, before I re-join my husband of eighteen months in New Zealand, after six months apart. I was, at this point, a marriage migrant and a ‘global’scholar who needed to uproot and re-root everything–midway through my doctoral programme.

In this chapter, I take an intersectional look at being a firstgeneration migrant, and early career academic (ECA) in a neoliberal university. I write this autoethnographic account to make sense of what it is like to be an ‘outsider’trying to gain entry into a sector that, as it stands, makes it hard for its ‘insiders’ to fully belong. I say ‘make sense’for a couple of reasons. Firstly, sense-making, it is argued, is a key tenet of doing autoethnography (Adams et al. 2015: 27). Secondly, this is an ongoing journey, a lifein-progress. It is a phase of professional coming-of-age. I’ve merely paused here, on this page, in self-reflection, allowing for further sense-making to happen (Ibid).