London Livin'

Something that people might have picked up on in past posts (it wasn't so subtle) was that I wasn't entirely excited about starting my job after travelling the world. And sure, I guess going to any job after 18 months of exploring incredible places and doing whatever you wanted was going to be hard. And I knew that, and I had resigned myself to that, and I tried to attribute my first few months of job unhappiness to the inevitable shock to the system of transitioning from travelling to working life. I really did try.

And yet. Whilst a cliche, I really did feel like quite a different person after my adventures than I did before I left. And certainly very different to the naive little 20 year old who accepted a job offer at a huge London corporation for 2 years time. Having my job at KPMG was just far too convenient for me. After making a ton of money during the internship (with the sole reason of applying and accepting the internship to make money to travel), being offered a job with an opportunity to travel for a year first was just too irresistible. Finally! I could stop thinking about boring grown up things and enjoy my final year at university without worrying about getting a job! I could travel for a year without feeling guilty about burning my savings, or borrowing money from my parents, because HEY, I have a JOB, and I can earn all that money back later!

After the time in Scandinavia I begun to wonder about whether I had been wise in my choices. But by that point, with only a short pit stop in England before being South America bound, it was just too convenient then to forget about the future and enjoy the present. Whenever someone asked me while I was travelling what I would do when I got back to England I explained about my job, and tried to quell my doubts however I could, laughing off their questions about whether I would like it and evading the questions about what it would involve. "Well well!" I said "I am enjoying this now while I can, and then will sell my soul for 3 years to pay back the money! Cheers!". And they would throw me a glance and laugh.

I perhaps should never have started the job, but then again, I got well paid for my year at KPMG. I found a lovely little flat with a couple of good friends close to the office, saved on rent and travel, and so managed to save a fair bit of my paycheck. After my year I had a fairly good sum to stick into savings, and it enabled me to be brave enough to leave and make the move towards something I actually wanted to do in my life. Oh and I also such a fun year with all my London friends!

Christmas Dinner with my two lovely housemates

KPMG grads Christmas Dinner

So, it's not that I even hated the work. It was exciting working in Canary Wharf, I had some really lovely people I worked with, and the projects all sounded so interesting (in principle.) Fraud! Money laundering! Investigations! I was gonna be like a detective sniffing out Walter White! (Okay, I knew it wouldn't be quite that sexy). The reality was many long hours in different rooms (most without windows....), staring at excel spreadsheets, or trawling through databases trying to find reference to some obscure farm in Zimbabwe whose owners held money in some bank. And I actually had it fairly easy the entire time, with never hours too crazy. Colleagues regularly worked 50 hour weeks. Some went abroad (how exciting! Working in Paris, Zurich, Milan! Except all they saw of those places was the office, the hotel room and the taxi ride to the airport.... as they worked 70 hours in a week scanning through bank sheets). And I knew that would be before long! Things got to breaking point at the time when, after working overtime without extra pay or time in lieu, you chat to your Norwegian boyfriend who cheerily mentions "Oh yeah so, I worked a few extra hours this week so.... I'm not gonna work Friday. Gonna go on a long skiing weekend instead".

Asides from the work, the studying and the exams were fairly dire, but at the same time I did enjoy learning. I enjoyed the challenges, and some things I could even see were interesting and useful. The stress was a bit ridiculous, and it didn't help that 90% of the material was stuff that didn't interest me. I felt like I was jumping through hoops, and well, I am very good at that, I have done that my whole life. The hoops led me through school, through sixth form, all the way through Durham and to a graduate job. But these KPMG hoops scared me, they seemed to be leading me not into many more opportunities like the other hoops, but into some kind of business, corporate, money-minded trap. I knew that if I jumped through too many, I would find myself locked into 2 more years with the firm (the first year you can walk away scott free. But if you jump one hoop too many and then decide to leave, you could face over £5 grand of fees to repay for the exams).

But don't get me wrong, it really was a fantastic place to work if you wanted big money, if you wanted the prestigious ACA qualification and a ticket to any financial job you could name, and if that kind of stuff interested you. But more and more I felt it didn't; no matter how many times I tried to convince myself. After many long months of indecision, I finally handed in my notice. The biggest wrench was saying goodbye to the people, who were genuinely some of the nicest and smartest people I had ever met. But I did take heart from my boss's reaction who, after hearing my reasons for leaving, exclaimed "Well, I think you're absolutely making the right decision! Wish I'd done the same before I got kids and a mortgage!".

So what was my decision? I took my dissatisfaction and I went right back to basics and thought about what I had always wanted to do since I was kid. Before pressures of teachers and society had forced me one way or another. And that was marine biology- I am a little whale and dolphin fanatic. I spent my time researching courses and options, looking for some kind of way to use my BA in Philosophy into a way that would let me do an MSc in Marine Biology. The UK was out of the picture- at 9 grand a year for a bachelors degree and no student loan support for individuals who already held a degree, there was no way I'd be able to afford to take the bachelors level modules I needed for the masters. And then Norway popped up again, like it always does, providing me with exactly what I needed.

Norway has one of the longest coastlines in the world. Its most important industry after oil is fisheries, and it has a thriving marine biology network. It also happens to have several resident populations of killer whales, dolphins, sperm whales and other marine life, and... (of course) zero tuition fees. I applied for a ton of courses and ended up getting accepted to them all, finally deciding to choose a programme at the University of Oslo. The first year is an intensive Norwegian language, preparing me for a second year of a mixture of biology chemistry and maths modules, taught in norwegian, which I need in order to qualify for the masters. It was going to be alot of time in university, but I figured it would never hurt to be fluent in Norwegian, a country that I had begun to fall in love with. (When else would I ever be able to have a whole Norwegian language course for free?!) It also of course prepared me for getting a part time job because of course, whilst the course is free, I still need to live. And Norway is a very expensive country to live in.

So here I am now, 7 weeks into the Norwegian language course, and loving being a student again! The grand goal is to get on and study my masters in marine biology, but nothing can happen until after I get my norwegian and bachelors modules. And what is the rush anyway? With the way things are going, I'll be retiring when I'm 80. Why work a grown up job before you have to?  I'm going to have fun being a student for as long as I want and can.....