Hi, some background:
I’m 27F, living in Germany (dual citizen of US and Germany, English native speaker), working as a software engineer for 3 years, and next year in July, or if not then October, I plan to attend a language school in Tokyo on a 1-year working holiday visa. I minored in Japanese in college and I’m somewhere between N3 and N2 now but I want to pass N2 to make it easier to find employment so I can permanently move to Japan. Since virtually all my interests/hobbies revolve around Japan, it’s been my life goal to move since I was 12, and with every passing year the sense of urgency to finally “start my life” in Japan increases.
I think the working holiday visa rules say that you shouldn’t use it with the aim of finding a full-time job, so I won’t officially put that in my plan when I submit the app, but it’s my hidden agenda. Haha.
So I want to attend a language school for 6 months, then (unless I fail the JLPT) quit in the interest of saving money. But I’m kind of unsure of what to do after that point. Maybe move to the countryside and strengthen my portfolio with some new projects while applying to jobs. And do part-time work teaching English or something. I do like teaching to some extent, or at least my teaching encounters always feel more emotionally rewarding than sitting behind a computer and reading code all day.
To be honest, I’m kind of at a crossroads where I’m not sure if programming is something I could do forever (or maybe I’m just burned out) but I’m not sure what else I would want to do, besides maybe 3D modeling for video games. I always wanted to work in games but my late dad pushed me into the programming side because he said the “artsy stuff” was less employable. Now I don’t work in games, just boring B2B software, but to be fair, my work-life-balance matters more than working on something I’m pasionate about… I think. I mean, I know the game industry can be pretty toxic because it takes advantage of people’s “passion” to push long hours. However I’ve always enjoyed the process of programming games in college/internship…
Sorry, kind of going off on a tangent here. But the flexibility of the working holiday visa feels like a good chance to get things sorted out. Will probably talk about this at some point with my therapist too but we have more urgent things to discuss for now…
In the end, I guess I don’t need to have the latter six months “planned out” per se but if anyone has ideas on how else I might be able to use that time to my advantage, I’m all ears (all eyes?). Just want to make the most of this one-in-a-lifetime privilege.
Thanks!
by scarletbloom