Visiting the World, as a Geek? 695
Han Onymous asks: "In nine months my contract as a research assistent at my Alma Mater will come to an end. It will not be renewed, I don't want it to be anyway. But outside the economy is too ill to welcome me. I am young. I am healthy. And I want to see the world before I've got the wife and the kids and the double mortgage. I have no money saved, and I don't plan to save some until then. What can a skillful geek (electrical, electronical and software engineer, speaks three languages fluently) like me do to see the world. Volunteer ? Working for a multinational with exchange programs? Something with no connection at all to the tech world? Please share your experience."
Peace Corp (Score:5, Informative)
Have fun! (Score:5, Informative)
Well... (Score:2, Informative)
GeekCorps, teaching ESL (Score:5, Informative)
Another tip: think about teaching English in the Far East. The job offers are plentiful, you don't need a teaching certificate, and the compensation is quite good. You don't have to speak Japanese or Chinese to get those kinds of positions, either. I've had a few friends do it for several summers, and had nothing but great things to say.
Teach English (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily the best job (a friend of mine had a nasty experience in S. Korea, all that stuff you hear about southeast asian kids having huge amounts of respect for their teacher is absolute CRAP) but its something to do to foot the bill for travelling. Usually they expect someone with a BA, but a BEng/BSC/MSc / whatever you've got should be fine (another friend of mine is teaching English in Japan right now - and I met a Scotsman on a train from Prague to Frankfurt who was teaching english in Germany)...
Helps to bone up on your grammar though, but for a trilingual like yourself, that shouldn't be a problem.
Good luck!
Try This: (Score:5, Informative)
here a few of their addresses:
http://ewob.colorado.edu
EWOB USA
http://www.ewb-isf.org
EWB CANADA
http://www.isf-france.org
EWB France = Ingénieurs sans Frontières (ISF)
There are lots of other local and national EWB groups, a google search should find em.
NGO's that want geeks. (Score:5, Informative)
Articles on the topic (Score:5, Informative)
first part [kuro5hin.org] second part [kuro5hin.org]
Why the hell don't you have any money saved? (Score:4, Informative)
You're going to be old and infirm someday. Don't believe the lies that you'll actually be able to live off of your government pension (since it started as a senior-vote-buying measure, and will end when it runs out of money or leads to huge defecits once the boomers all retire), because you will be screwed. The first thing you should do is go and buy this book [bookzone.com], then read it. Follow its advice.
Once you have a secure financial base, go ahead and explore the world, get married, etc. Do whatever your heart desires, but do not get started without some money saved away for your retirement, or you will be screwed when you're older.
Back to the question at hand:
If you really speak a variety of languages, see what it takes to get a work visa there. Often it's a lot of work, but it can be really fun to live somewhere for a year and do whatever it is you're skilled at doing (good non-tech ones are teaching english, cooking, bartending, etc). You can't just go to a country and work there legally unless you have a work visa, so be sure to get that squared away first.
Another thing to do would be to save up money, and backpack across Europe (or somewhere else that's population dense). It's fairly easy to do, there are plenty of youth hostels, and transportation between locales is cheap if you hitch-it. Heck, if you're feeling daring, you could even try to do it while carting along a small appliance [amazon.com].
AIESEC (Score:4, Informative)
AIESEC facilitates international exchange of thousands of students and recent graduates each year. Whether in a paid traineeship or as a volunteer for a non-profit organisation, their experiences abroad will undoubtedly affect them forever.
Behind everything we do is our mission: to contribute to the development of our countries and their people with an overriding commitment to international understanding and co-operation.
Over the years AIESEC has evolved into something that is spirited with endless energy. We, the young people who run this organisation have a hope for something better in the world, and this is a hope that AIESEC tempers with a practical approach.
http://www.aiesec.org [aiesec.org]
Re:Teach English (Score:3, Informative)
I taught English in Taiwan for a year, loved it, and eventually found additional bits of work that drew more on my tech background. By the way, I did find a lot of respect for teachers, but most of my students were adults.
Just go. (Score:3, Informative)
Just go.
Bartender/ski lift operator/au pair/whatever: Go to a fabulous country, have no time to do anything, and get paid next to nothing doing crap work!
Merchant Marines: Little known fact - today's modern container ships only take a few hours to offload - this means that ships spend as little time as possible in port. If you like taking weeks to get somehwere, and spending literally a few hours there, this is they way to go!
Peace Corps: Heh.
Volunteering: Well, you're VOLUNTEERING!
Bottom line is that many of these things are over-romanticized.
IMHO, the best thing to do is to get a backpack, put a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, a tent,
and a towel in it, buy a plane ticket to somewhere, and go.
I was in Turkey at a youth hostel once, and encountered a Dutch guy who was in the middle of a backpacking trip. He started of hitching in the netherlands, had gone through russia, mongolia, china, vietnam, thailand, india, pakistan, and iran, and had just gotten off of the train in eastern Turkey. He was washing washing his spare clothes - a change of underwear.
It doesn't take much money, and you can make a game of trying to find work to supplement your trip. A few thousand will keep you going for months if you're frugal, and you don't have anyone telling you what to do! If you don't like walking, and want to go fast, bring a bike.
Most of all, just have fun and enjoy the experience.
Right on! (Score:5, Informative)
I lived and worked in London for four years, 3 years in various levels of IT for various IT departments all around the city. For those that had the experience, contracting rates could go as high as 1000 Pounds/day (mainframe programmer). Americans can get a 1-year work visa, countries in the Commonwealth get 2 years or more if your parents or grandparents were British citizens.
For up to date details go to or write to your nearest British consulate or embassy.
The are lots of other countries that offer work visas as well, look in the travel section of your bookstore for ideas on working overseas, they'll have names and addresses to contact.
Take an international work exchange (Score:3, Informative)
If German is one of the languages, consider DAAD (Score:2, Informative)
Working Holiday Visas (Score:3, Informative)
The US of course only has these visas if your a Saudi even though they would be a major help to the depressed travel business. If your in this age group, maybe its something you should write your congresscritter about because they are making lots of changes to the immigration rules.
Most places also have Youth Hostels. These are cheap places to stay and they can range from small private rooms to a more typical dorm with several bunk beds in a room. In a big city downunder, it will cost you about US$10 a night. Other places can be three times more (London) or $2 nite (Bali last month). Its a great way to meet people. Some of my geek friends even meet their girlfriends while staying at yough hostels. The typical traveler will pack up all their stuff in a backpack and just go from place to place and find work when they can, see the differnt places, meet lots of people and then keep on going. Its a great way to spend a year or so.
Re:Peace Corp (Score:3, Informative)
http://us.aieseconline.net
Teaching ESL in Taiwan (Score:5, Informative)
I settled on Taiwan for my base of operations. The list of 3 I considered was Japan, Korea and Taiwan. I chose Taiwan because of the people I had met from these 3 places, Taiwanese were the easiest and most friendly.
What to do in Taiwan? Teach English to start. During the summer I gauarntee you will have people come up to you on the street and beg you to teach English for $15-20 bucks an hour. This sounds great, and summer is good to start becuase you'll get classes all day long and into the evening. After that it is mostly evenings, unless you can get in at a Kindergarden.
Kindergardens are the best. You can get 2-4 hours a morning of just playing with 4-9 year olds. Don't knock it until you've tried it. This age group is by far the easiest to teach. Teaching 10-13 year olds is a real pain, and involves lots of yelling becuase the schools usually cram 20-30 into a room that is barely double the size of your standard dorm room (can anyone say "Firehazard?" Oh wait, the fire inspector is coming, quick! take half the desks outside and hide them! (seriously, this happens a lot in Taiwan, along with the passing of red envolopes)).
If you have your degree, you are set to get yourself settled in Taiwan. Teaching English and finding a place to stay are your first priorities.
Now, after you are set up and find that you hate kids, or more likely hate the people running the schools, go find a job writing Techinical manuals. ASUS is up in a low rent, but fairly nice, area. Big building, has a swimming pool you can use after hours. The guy running the Documentation department is real cool, and promises to shield his team from company politics. I turned down the job at the time because they weren't paying in anything but promises of stock options (not a year later and the bubble burst, so I do feel vindicated).
Trend Micro has a good department, and working there could get you back to the 'States into a real job. I turned that one down becuase the offer came after I had bought myself and my wife plane tickets to come back. Would have been fun. Lots of oportunity there.
There was a Graphics company a friend of mine worked at. He had a lot of fun there, but complained about management stupidity. He quit, came back to the 'states and got hired by the US department. Sorry to say I lost track of him (Dave, if you're around and reading this try my yahoo account, its still my primary acount)
Overall, Taiwan was a blast. The first 6 months were hell, trying to learn to teach and deal with culture shock. But it was a wonderful experience. Now I'm teaching MCSE and CCNA classes at a Jr. College in the 'States. Guess I learned to like teaching (wasn't easy to learn, let me tell you)
Re:Want to see the world? (Score:2, Informative)
Corporate work is THE way to go if you want to see any of the more expensive corners of the world. Singapore, for example, is an amazing city, well, except for the weird anti-gum thing, and it's close to all of SE asia (good as a home base) but it's expensive as hell to rent a decent apt. there - most companies will give you an apt.
Also on the list of live-there-if-you're-corporate : tokyo, hong kong (amazing place if you get someone else to pay), NYC, London (makes NYC seem cheap), anywhere in switzerland, the list goes on...
Just find a company that has a lot of overseas offices and get yourself re-assigned to one of them. If you and they are US based they're usually looking for good 'american' people to work in the overseas offices
Re:Peace Corp (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes, you are being cynical (Score:5, Informative)
On the ship, we visited Alcupulco, Panama, Hong Kong, Singapore, India (forget the port name), Newcastle and Freemantle (Australia), Abu Dhabi and Dhubi (United Arab Emirates), Oman (again forget the port name) and several US ports.
Most dangerous port I've been to: San Diego - where we had one of our guys shot at a night club, and a couple others mugged.
Visiting the world (Score:2, Informative)
I boated in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North & South Carolina, New Mexico, Utah, and California. I did have to work at a ski resort for Dec, Jan, and Feb when the commercial river industry is pretty weak but I could have gone to Australia, New Zealand, or South America if I could have afforded the air fair as some of my friends have done. All of those countries, as well as Europe and Asia, have large white water attractions. It takes as little as a week to become trained to guide class III water on the Arkansas River in Colorado: the most rafted river in the country. You can get information by contacting the:
Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area
307 West Sackett Ave.
Salida, CO 81201
U.S.A.
719-539-7289
They can give you the names and numbers of over 50 rafting companies that will train you to become a guide at the beginning of every year. From there you will meet enough people to get to know where the commercial river comapnies are all over the country. I worked for so many different companies during that year and a half that I lost track.
Best of Luck,
Strap on a backpack and GO! (Score:2, Informative)
A great book to get you started is: The Practical Nomad [hasbrouck.org]. Read through that, or similar literature, and you'll be so stoked to travel that nothing will hold you back.
Don't worry about "the world climate." The media hypes everything, just like shark attacks. Keep your wits about you and you'll be fine.
Don't worry about geeking out. Take a PDA with a backup cartridge; there are cyber cafes all over the world you can use for internet and mail access.
Fly high little bunny!
Matt
P.S. check out my website [mojotoad.com] if you want to read through some of my travel stories.
Peace Corps (Score:5, Informative)
I did the peace corps thing after college. And I'd recommend it highly. If you have the chance, jump at it. You'll see and do things you'd probably never encounter otherwise and you'll learn a lot. Some employers will discount it as will some grad schools - but others will look on it as a big plus.
Photos from a geek-turned-Peace-Corps-volunteer (Score:3, Informative)
For pictures of my experiences, see my site [vocaro.com]. You'll notice that I brought my laptop with me and was able to apply my geek skills by teaching computer classes on the side. You can find more stories about my geeky life in the Peace Corps here [vocaro.com].
When I left Ghana for good in August 2001, I still wasn't yet ready to return to the life of a software developer, so I immediately applied for a job as an English teacher with Nova [teachinjapan.com], the largest private school in Japan. As some here have suggested, this is another great way for geeks see the world and learn skills that don't require electricity. For anyone thinking of that route, I've written some tips [vocaro.com] on deciding whether to join Nova.
Trevor
IAESTE (Score:3, Informative)
I got a summer exchange internship in Norway over 20 years ago with IAESTE, and met many current friends that were there with both IAESTE and AIESEC from around the world - that summer in Bergen alone there were exchange students from these organizations from France, Denmark, Scotland, USA, Canada, Nigeria, Yugoslavia (that was then), Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, England, Ireland, Italy, and probably more that I can't remember.
Enjoy!
Check 'em out
Re:Peace Corps (Score:2, Informative)
Pelton's Most Dangerous Places books and videos reenforced my tactics for being out there in dangerous places.
I'm from a rough place, an Indian Reservation, if you can communicate without being too prideful, if you can talk to people well, and don't stick out, you can go anywhere.
I sat at a bus stop outside Hebron, and while I'm not Jewish, I've been mistaken for one by Isrealis, American Jews, Italians, Dutch, I talked for 45 minutes with a Palestinian activist who had just returned from Tunis. I've sat down with militant Jews, American Indian Movement fellas, serious white-hating Blacks and a mixture of Palestinian factions with no problems.
Two of my best friends in High School are hardcore AIM/Cheyenne Sioux activists, and I am not
It's all good, and it is mostly safe out there.
Two words: Emergecy Exit (Score:2, Informative)
Stupid? Maybe. Ill-timed? Probably. Cut us a little slack-- we had wanderlust on the brain. The dot-com disaster gave us the kick we needed to shed the albatross of responsibility hanging from our necks and hit the road.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to be irresponsible, you might as well go all out. Why have a young-life crisis quietly when you can have one loudly? Why not broadcast it to the world and convince others to follow in your footsteps? Because the truth is, once we started looking into it, we realized that taking a traveling sabbatical wasn't as hard as we thought it'd be. And you didn't have to be as rich as we thought you did.
The hardest thing about leaving for the unknown was deciding to leave. That, and figuring out what we needed to do, check, bring. We started thinking about creating a place where would-be bohemians could go for "The Big I's"-- information and inspiration. And that's how emergencyexit.net was born.
Love this site [emergencyexit.net]!
Re:Peace Corp (Score:5, Informative)
In regards to the job analogy, you don't get sent to jail for deciding to quit your civilian job.
Another Christian Group (Score:1, Informative)
First glance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Peace Corp (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Peace Corp (Score:4, Informative)
You must be living in a fantasy world, or are just being fucking naive.
There's a reason why the US wants to exempt its citizens from international justice system [amnestyusa.org]. The crimes committed by the US military forces are plentiful [mediamonitors.net], yet there seems very little accountability to be going on in the US.
Take a look at VSO (Score:1, Informative)
US citizens can volunteer through VSO Canada. I have met a few. They do have tech placements, as I also know a few. You do get a living allowance (based on local wages). While every placement is different, many get excellent experience which is usefull when they return home.
check out;
www.vsocanada.org
or
www.vso.org.uk
Just letting you know the option is there. If you are looking to go in nine months, you should be making contact soon.
Regards and good luck.
What I did. (Score:2, Informative)
If you can get some money saved up before you leave, it's very easy to find jobs working in the tourist sector where you don't make any money, but you get free accomodation, food, and usually enough cash for some beer. There's lots of work in hostels and bars for anyone who speaks english and doesn't need to get paid a lot. Stay there for a while then travel for a bit, dipping into that base of cash and find another place to work.
At the moment I'm in Romania. I've been travelling with two other guys who've come here looking for work. They asked around and ran into a Peace Corp's guy who gave them a lot of information on work here working in orphanages with kids, or even working with the city to help with the stay dog problem (catching, vaccination, and such... )
If you're a little nervous about just comming over and 'hoping for the best' you can always check the internet for volunteer jobs.. They'll often even pay for your travel to the place.. www.care.org is the firts to come to mind, but I'm sure there's other a google search will bring up.
Teach English (Score:2, Informative)
And since you have a University Degree you can pretty much teach English in any country you want in Asia.
The ESL Market is really large and you have the ability to save a decent amount of money too if you decide to work in Korea, Taiwan or Japan. If more exotic locations are to your liking, you can teach in China, Indonesia, Phillipines, Thailand, Vietnam etc but the pay in those locations is abyssmal by North American or European standards, however you usually get paid about 10x what local residents do. For instance, in China an english teacher gets paid 6000 yuan a month where most locals earn about 600.
Most schools will pay for your airfare and your housing so you have very little upkeep.
In addition, if you have a Masters degree, regardless of field, you can get a job teaching English in an Asian university as a visiting Professor.
Best way to see the world.
I know because I'm a geek with craploads of qualifications but decided to teach English in Seoul, Korea and its quite the experience.
For more info you can check out www.eslcafe.com it can get you started for whatever you need.
Three languages (Score:2, Informative)
What about civil service JOBS? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Peace Corp (Score:3, Informative)
If you are ordered to kill innocent civilians and you disobey because you believe it's an unlawful order, that is okay.
If you are ordered to get out of bed on time and go do your mandatory physical training along with everybody else and you say no because you don't think it's lawful for someone to tell you to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, that is not okay.
I spent 3 years in the Army, doing the job of my choice and let the Army pick my duty station as long as I didn't have to leave the country, and I was quite happy with my time in service.
I currently work with at least 3 other veterans (1 Navy, 1 Air Force and 1 Nation Guard) and all three of them agree that they would do the same if they had it to do all over again. All three of them got to see the world at government expense because they wanted to *and* learned additional valuable skills that helped them to get their current jobs.
The smart thing to do is sign up to take the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Apptitude Battery) tests and find out what your scores are. If you score at least a 95 GT score you can pretty much write your own ticket and get the job of your choice. I know, I spent 3 months working in a recruiting station in my home town.
BUNAC (Score:3, Informative)
Have you thought about the UN or NATO? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.nato.int
http://www.un.org