What options do I have to create an equally cool experience as my exchange semester, I did while studying, now that I am in my late 20s and working fulltime (but plan to quit soon)?
I wanna spend like 6 - 12 months in a foreign country, integrate a partially in the local community and get a different perspective.
For doing so and being at least a little bit accepted by the locals, I need a purpose to be there. While doing an exchange semester, the purpose was to study, and even so many may have thought it was just for party, attending the best uni in the country, earned me way more respect from locals, than being an English teacher.
What comes to my mind is an extensive language course or working there? But as I have a master in CS, I am not willing to do exploitive labour in hostels or coffee shops. On the other hand, almost no country has the same great work/life/salary balance as central Europe does. So I guess getting stuck up in a 60 hour corporate job in South Korea wouldn't be worth it, despite this would be a great destination to spend my time in.
What do you guys suggest? I have saved up over a 100k € and I am open minded, no matter if it is Asia or South America.
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Maybe going to a foreign country to earn a phd would work? Gives you some freedom to work on what you want, gives you a purpose to be there, gives you a lot of respect from locals. Since you're in CS there's probably some world class asian researchers in shit like AI that could be fascinating to get up to speed with.
Would take more than a year though.
Maybe you could teach CS? I'm a software dev and I've thought about this a few times, just going to a random country and teaching courses. Even if there's no openings anywhere, you could try to meetup with local groups - I know there are linux user groups meetups every month around a few cities near me, where people just show up and show off cool software or things they're working on. Going to one of those led to me teaching a beginner course on Blender from one guy's web dev office. Applying that same kind of thinking you could take a vacation somewhere for a month, then try to meet local people with shared interests and try to lead it into something bigger to justify staying longer.
Thanks, that's actually a great idea to get started. Just hit up some local Meetups, talk to the more involved people and ask around if there is any demand for coding lessons. However after maybe one or two free web dev teaching sessions, I would need to monetize the whole thing, to at least break even with classroom rent and equipment. As I doubt that a company would provide a room for free, more than couple of times.
PhD would also an interesting option, however, a quite intense one. Especially if you consider the usual long hours and bad salary. So I feel like that finding a good phd position with a non exploitive prof internationally, without knowing the uni first, is more like finding the needle in a haystack.
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Language study of at least half a year.
Since you're paying, you can dictate the terms of your stay, so you should be able to choose your "holidays" in which you can travel around and use your newly gained language skills outside your familiar environment.
For the full experience stay with a host family for a month or two, but since you're past your early twenties already you might find that cringy and I can understand that.
Another way to live while studying would be to find a coliving space, it sounds cringy but with the right people it can be a great experience, especially if it's the right mix of locals and foreigners.
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That's a great idea, but I think the make or break thing is to find a school, with motivated classmates and teachers. Not just a course that is forced upon expats by their company or visa requirements.
Studying another language for half a year might be fun, but I am debating wether any longer would completely kick me out of any CS career I would continue after this break?
Which countries would you recommene?
For this kind of longterm stay, I need the place to be not too shitholy. I dont think I would wanna study Bahasa Indonesia on Lombok, which I would visit again but only for travelling.
I did my exchange semester in Taiwan and really liked it there and with Chinese Courses afterwards, I got up to a level of 500 characters. This is something I could continue, however, apart from Taiwan and with China becoming a NoGo Zone for me, with the recent developments, there are not a lot of countries, I could utilize the language in. Additionally, I am not sure whether going back to the same place would a good idea, as you only get so many chances for a 6 months in a lifetime and there is much more to see.
Countrywise I also really liked Korea (even more than Japan), when I visited and could imagine a couple of months in Seoul would be fun. However, Korean seems like an even more useless language for an European.
And then there is Spanish, I have only been to Costa Rice and Nicaragua, but don't think any of these would be good for a longterm stay to study and learn the language. Safety seems to be a bit more of a concern in Spanish speaking countries of latin america, as well. I am not keen on getting shot in a robbery attempt.
>Korean seems like an even more useless language for an European
Like Japanese, Korean is a pretty useless skill by itself, but that shouldn't keep you from studying there if you're interested in the country, culture and people.
If you knew more Chinese then you could leverage your Chinese vocabulary in Korean and impress the locals with random complex words they barely know.