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Visiting the World, as a Geek?
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."
Join the peace corps.
You're looking for "Engineers Without Borders":
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.
Try geek corps or Engineers without borders or if you're Canadian you can apply to Net Corps.
first part second part
An aside:
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, 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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The worlds largest student organisation. AIESEC is a global network of 50,000 members across more than 83 countries and territories at more than 800 universities world-wide.
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
Working as a bartender? A merchant marine? A volunteer? The Peace Corps? Bah. Forget it.
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.
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.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
AIESEC is the world's largest student run organization, setting up work exchanges in 87 countries. They usually have a real demand for people with a background like yours. You won't be paid a lot of money, but you will get an amazing cultural experience.
After college, I had the chance to participate in the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), or the German Academic Exchange Service. I got the opportunity to work in Berlin at the PTB (their version of NIST) for the summer before I started graduate school. I had also applied to DAAD for the previous summer (for between my junior and senior years), but they got back to me late by which time I had accepted another summer research opportunity in the States. If I had held out for that, I would have been working in Aachen at a nuclear physics institute, if I remember correctly. When I participated, I got a reasonable monthly stipend which I was able to live off of month-to-month. Depending on the involvement of the local support group, you may have a lot of activities available to you or not. But the weekends are typically yours, so you can travel around Europe some then. And in Germany, I met participants who were there for nearly a year, so they were allowed to take a week-long vacation. And depending on the activity of the local chapter, there may be many students there from other countries. I met people from at least 10 different countries during my summer. Actually, regardless of my title above, you don't necessarily need to know German. Some of the other participants I met barely knew German, but still were there. After a quick Google search, check www.daad.de for their web site (or www.daad.de/deutschland/en for the English version).
Every civilized country in the world has Working Holiday Visas that allow young people to visit their country and work. The "young" bit is a subset of the range between 16 and 35 and the time they allow you to work is somewhere between one and three months with some odd requirements. For example in Australia, you can visit for up to a year, but can only work in any location for up to 3 months and only 6 months out of the year. The idea of these is to allow visitors to earn enough money so they enjoy their travels but to be restrictive enoungh not to displace local workers. The work that people on these visas get tends to be the kinds of jobs no one else wants but with computer skills, you should be able to find something.
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.
First off, what consulting co. do you work for? I'd love to use them / move there - every contsultant I've ever met with virtually no exception has been only marginally more skillfull than average and they seemed to enjoy the luxury of mistakes more than I ever could.
:)
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
closed minded is as closed minded does
I spent 4 years in the Navy, 3 of them living on a ship.
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.
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
I am a white water river guide, a kayaker capable of boating class V water, I can rescue people that have been thrown from a river raft with my kayak, and can also run a video camera. That skill set enabled me to strap my kayak on my car, remove the back seat of a Honda Accord and pack it full of crap (including a tent and sleeping bag), and tour the US for a year and a half. I got to boat some of the most intense water in the country and see some of the most beautiful scenery you can imagine. I spent 20 days traveling 228 miles through the entire Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. I started ten miles below Hoover dam and boated all the way to Lake Mead. It only took about 100 cases of beer to get the 16 of us through the trip! :-)
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,
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
I just recently finished a year's worth of travel. It was budget travelling, 3/4 of which was in the third world, all of which ended up costing about $22,000. Highly recommended.
A great book to get you started is: The Practical Nomad. 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 if you want to read through some of my travel stories.
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.
For pictures of my experiences, see my site. 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.
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, 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 on deciding whether to join Nova.
Trevor
Like AIESEC mentioned above, IAESTE is a great exchange organization: International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience. Find the US site at http://www.aipt.org/subpages/iaeste_us/index.php
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
I really got the feeling if you don't look nervous, don't flash wealth, don't look/act paranoid, nothing bad will happen.
:).
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.
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!
in need of computer types is called Mercy Ships. They have a few boats that go to third world countries and perform medical operations as well as community development stuff (water, sanitation, disease education, etc). Check them out at www.mercyships.org. I'm thinking of doing this myself.
I am the original poster. Thanks for the many answers. Too bad I could not participate more actively due to hours incompatibility between US and EU. At first glance it will take ages to read everything. One thing I noticed is the frequent mention of the Peace Corps. I should have told that IANAUSC. I am not an US citizen. No peace corps for me.
I have not seen VSO mentioned in the comments above. VSO stands for Voluntary Service Overseas. I am an engineer who is currently on a placement in Southern Africa for two years.
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.
I left home for a four month trip around Europe to get away from my 'tech job'. It's been three years and I haven't been home yet. Being Canadian I can work in the other commonwealth countries, but aside from that I've worked in France helping out at a hostel and ended up running a bar in Turkey on the beach for three months.
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.
If you want to see the world and don't care about doing a geek job.
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.
You know we seemingly have only two sides from what i have read so far: 1)join armed forces 2)join peace corps Ok, if you don't feel like you're the military type, why not work as a federal government employee in science apps or engineering? You end up traveling alot, and while the pay might be less than private sector, it's certainly nothing to sneeze at. And if you can get a security clearance you'll ususally end up working on cool new tech. I'm a Navy software engineering co-op and have thoroughly enjoyed my work thus far. It's not like you're IN the military (I think many are afraid your boss = drill sergeant, which is not the case at all).
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
BUNAC has work programs for young people in all sorts of countries. http://www.bunac.org/
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I served 6 months in Sarajevo last year as an Army Reservist. I ended up working with civilians from the UN and NATO who had neat jobs and were making decent (tax-free) money.
http://www.nato.int
http://www.un.org