 Ask me anything. Ask me anything. My name is Jason Ball. I am a PhD student here at OIST. I'm originally from the United States, Michigan, specifically. I am studying physics, quantum physics, and ask me anything. Can I have a family and do a PhD at the same time? Do you want to? I would say if you want to, yes. And actually I would go a step further and I would say if you want to then you should because I don't think there will be another time in your life where you are going to have the degree of flexibility and support than you will here at OIST. Having a kid, obviously having kids, doing your PhD, you're going to be busy. You're going to be very busy, but you will be supported. You will have the Ganju Center. You will have the daycare. You will have financial support. You will have healthcare for your kids here. You will have an extraordinary amount of flexibility with your experiments, with your research, when you want to be in the lab, when you want to be with your kids, if you need to take time off because one of your kids is sick, or one of your kids has some important thing they need to do. I don't think that there is a time in my life that would have been more convenient from a family perspective to have a kid. If a family is something that you want, I would strongly recommend. You're going to have to rebuild. You're going to have to start a new life when you start a PhD anyway, so you might as well just build your life with your kids. What are you staking on me? What do I got? Oh, I got Mount Fuji. Okay, see, there we go. I got Mount Fuji. What support will I have? You will have financial support. You will have child support. So we have the daycare just here on campus. It's right around the corner, and my kids love it. They love going to the daycare. It's super convenient, and it's staffed by lovely people. Emotional support. We've got a on-campus counseling center called the Ganju Center, and it's lovely, again, staffed by lovely people, and they will help you take care of yourself here. It's really great to just drop in there and be able to talk. Whenever things get stressful, whenever things are feeling too much, there are a lot of resources here, both for you, your mental health, your children, your financial situation. You will be supported in many different ways when you come to East. Hi, my name is Virginia. I'm Jason's spouse. I pretty much immediately got pregnant as soon as we were here, and so for the first number of months until I was about seven or eight months pregnant, I was actually a substitute teacher at the CDC, and then when I had my child, I took a bit of a break, and then I soon found that there was a demand for English tutoring on campus, and before I came here, I was an English teacher, so I tutored a lot of the kids on campus, professors' children, some student children, research staff's children, and that sort of took off for a while until I found out that there was an opportunity to do proofreading and editing within the communications and public relations department at OIST. Beyond that, there are plenty of opportunities as well. All right, so we got the next question. What do you do for fun? I guess that's allowed. You're never too far from the beach here in Okinawa, and we love to play in the water, love to go to the parks. There's a lot of great parks around here, a lot of hiking trails. You know, you want to get yourself, you want to get your family out and about. There's many, many places to do that, and yeah, the beaches are lovely. They're always a good time to visit. How do you make friends in Okinawa? So actually, this is a thing where your kids will help you tremendously because I would say that 90% of my friends right now are also parents, so you get involved with the local school, you meet people through your kids' classes, you meet people through your lab group, who might also have kids. It's a great, it's a great connector, it's a great social connector. So yeah, I would say that's where most of my friends come from at this point, and we have picnics, we have play dates, we go to the park, and we all let our kids run around and play together. That's, it's really nice to have that kind of friend and support group among the parents here at Einstein. Well, thank you for all your questions today. I've had a lot of fun answering them. If you want to find out more, you can check out OIST's website at www.oist.jp or you can subscribe to this channel for more information. Can I change my field? Definitely. Definitely. Yes. I know biologists have gone into the quantum field. That's impressive.