This is an amazing story about an incredibly boring individual — Or is it the other way around?
It brings us back to September 2012. I had just completed a chapter of my life that consisted of being constantly divided between finishing my degree in Computers Engineering and working on the overwhelming passion of making music (see my stuff). I didn't exactly enjoy the former but I couldn't make a living of the latter. It's not that I didn't like programming — I always did and I've always been pretty good at it. It's just that I can't see my life as numbers and calculations, so I tend to look at computer programming and music in the same way: I love creating things in my mind and then bringing them to life.
When I graduated, I decided that I should live abroad for a while and enrich my academic background a little further. The location seemed pretty obvious: I'd been to London before a few times and I fell in love with the city and the atmosphere (not so much with the weather), so that was my immediate choice. I completed a Masters degree in Web Development (with Distinction and with the faculty's award for best masters project, which I'm legally obliged by my mom to state in public as often as possible) and the experience was amazing. It allowed me to specialise in a more creative area within computing and that made me feel good again about my education choices. I finally knew exactly what I wanted to do.
It was time to go back to Portugal, which I had learn to miss.
Back in sunny Portugal for a couple of weeks I started to realise that going back home right after the masters wasn't really getting the most out of the whole UK experience, so I decided to start looking for jobs in London. It was my first time looking for a job which meant that I had no expectations whatsoever. I had a couple of Skype interviews — yes, I was wearing my pyjamas on my first ever job interview — and a couple of days later I had a job offer. This was the start of a crazy couple of weeks that led to me going back to London and staying on a tiny hotel room with no windows while going to a couple more interviews, refusing the initial job offer on the last minute and accepting a role at Monocle instead.
Almost 9 months later I handed in my resignation letter — I was offered something better and more exciting somewhere else. Portugal? Not just yet. There's not a day that goes by without me thinking about Portugal and how much I want to go back, but it's still not the time. There's still room for me to grow here as a professional and maybe there's still room for Portugal to stabilise a bit more. I don't know when that will happen, but whenever I book my final flight to OPO I don't want to book a return.
Eduardo Bouças, Web Developer, London
This post is a part of a series of guest articles entitled “a country of emigrants and a world of stories“. You can find the whole stories here.
