Who Moved My Singapore Cheese

My Australian student visa has arrived! Despite all the hesitations and hem-hawings in the past months, I can now feel the first drips of adrenalin and excitement about all the possible events that will take shape in the next few years.

Suffering from yet another bout of self-induced doubt and panic yesterday, I went back to the drawing block and re-examined my choice; which is to study IT in Australia, as opposed to a Finance Masters in Chicago, as opposed to a, till-now non-existent, job offer to go work in Hongkong. For my own benefit of not having to go through another round of panic I've decided to list down my findings this time...

Jobs

I spent a few hours poring through job websites in both Chicago and Sydney. I spoke to a pal in Chicago who alerted me to the dire employment situation there; he forwarded me the USCIS link to see how the 65000 H1B visa annual quota in USA used to be 'over-subscribed' on the very first day of release on the 1st of April every year and yet up till now (3rd July, 2009) there has only been about 45000 filings.

That thereabout dashed all naive hopes of thinking Shirley (my spouse) can land a visa sponsorship for a job there on goodwill, good faith, good connections or good whatever; and the high possibilities of myself failing to do so after my program (despite the constant thought that Chicago should be the natural career destination given its status as the mecca of capital markets and the birthplace of futures).

Looking to the job market in Sydney, using http://www.seek.com.au/ , I found a great deal of interesting jobs in the finance + IT hybrid domain. On top of that, Shirley will have the legal rights to seek full and meaningful employment in Sydney, a land where bakers, office administrative workers, lawyers, accountants and all the rest all start on rather equal footing.

Life

I'm already established by all that know me well to be a fairly materialistic being. And so I went looking in http://www.property.com.au/ , zoomed in on a few decent, fairly close to CBD suburb neighbourhoods and started looking for housing under $500k; loved the sunny, bright, well-sized apartments/townhouses/houses I found.

I also checked with many many forums of people who lived in both cities/countries and were making comparisons. Sydneysiders really had a lot of good things being said about them. Something about people not caring for what you earned, or that you work to live not live to work etc...Racism is still something I keep thinking about, but according to my Chicago pal, its pretty much the same over his side of the world...and I thought about it, yeah it's true, caucasians have it better even in Singapore! So there really isn't much of a change to adapt to there.

All in all, I'm getting incrementally psyched about the big move!