Part 1: How to Find Work Abroad
Alright, having been asked about three times already this week, I’ve decided to write a little article about how I made it to the United States, from the small agency in New York to the largest software company in the world, from New York to Seattle. I will also explain how I got a job in London first and why this made it all happen afterwards.
First off, if going abroad is “just a dream” yet, make sure you find out how badly you really want it. Going abroad is not fun before you leave, not fun while you are there, but insanely awesome once you’ve survived and made it. I’ve had endless nights, sitting in a city with up to 8 million people around me and feeling more alone than in a silent forrest at night. It can be very tough. I am not kidding.
It’s 2004, I am in the military doing my 8-month service and basically just wasting a lot of time. My roommate, if you can call it a room, told me about how he did an internship in Oxford, UK. I was pretty pissed, how could I have waited long enough to find someone who already did that? I made up a plan. I spent quite a few nights translating my CV, shaping it up, writing a cover letter e-mail and collecting potential companies in London. It was a terrible task. I looked at a billion websites, collected e-mail addresses, looked through company directories, job sites with the hiring companies visible, just about anything that had a company name on it. Then, I started contacting them in batches of 10, always editing my cover letter a little bit, making sure I -sort of- spread my risk of not getting the job due to a stupid paragraph or so in the cover letter.
It took 108 e-mails until I received a first response that did not directly indicate that they are not interested. Most didn’t reply at all, some made it clear that they don’t see it happening for me. It was a guy from London, writing that he’d be interested to hear my story and why I would be interested in working at their company. I should call him. My alarms went off, worst nightmare, I should call?? But then they’ll find out my English is merely at highschool level and I will be so nervous and unable to explain what I am really capable of. I thought about it 3 or 4 days at least and almost dropped the whole idea until I found myself one night, sitting in a large forrest with a couple of other soldiers, just waiting, doing nothing but listening to the silence of the night. It was a typical military thing they did with us every once in a while, part of the programme so to say. So as we sat in the grass, I thought about how stupid it sometimes is, when people are insanely afraid of being in a large forrest at night. It’s probably a nightmare for most. It was for me, until that day when I found out it was totally easy to do. So I figured, I’ll be pissed for the rest of my life, if I don’t go and make that call soon, because I’d never know if it was a chance I have let go. So next morning, I packed a bag of coins, took it with me during our morning excercise run (think about the looks I got, taking that bag of coins with me, and the sound it made while running) and had to hide it somehow from the commander there. I then sneaked out as we passed a house with a phone booth next to it and disappeared. I entered the booth, took a deep breath, dialed and loaded the machine with endless amounts of coins.
Someone picked up the phone after a long while, I couldn’t understand a single word. I noticed the awkward silence after a bit and thought this must be the part where I should be saying hello, so I did. They barely understood me. It took me a few minutes to figure out that I was talking to a random guy, but not the one I had planned to call. So he told me I should call back later. Damn it! Very, very, very demotivating. I felt embarassed and pretty stupid. But I had started it, so I needed to finish this. I called again in the evening. The guy was very friendly, had a great old-english accent and I liked talking to him. But the conversation was very pointless, we didn’t get anywhere, it felt like he was about to say “We are going to call you and let you know then”. So I saw a last chance and said: “If you want, I can come to London and we can meet and talk.” I don’t know why I said that, what came upon me that moment, but it totally worked. You could clearly hear his voice go up and say: “Very good idea! If that would work for you, that’d be brilliant!”. So I booked a cheap Ryanair flight, went to our troop commander, who totally destroyed me, given the few days I was in the military yet and called me insane, respectless and not grown-up. I stood there, in a firm position, for at least 15 minutes as his anger rained down on me. And I was standing there thinking: I’ll break your neck right here right now if you do this to me and then tell me I can’t go. Lucky him, I was allowed to leave for two days. Got on the plane, flew to London, was two hours late for the lunch meeting, which matters for a lunch meeting, a lot, but still got the job. He said he was impressed by my commitment and how far I went to make it happen. I earned it, he said. The flight was 30 EUR total, including taxes, the phone call maybe 10 EUR, but it was all worth it. My first day of work paid me three times that investment at least. I had my first job abroad, spent 2 months in London after military service and nailed another year at the same company after they invited me and even talked me into doing it again in 2006.
Next part: How I got to New York.
