Transition Period

Last December on a snowy, dark morning, I packed my bags and left my apartment in Nový Lískovec. My stint in Brno had finished, and I was going home to the Philippines.

Have you ever seen a snake shedding its skin? It goes through a miserable, long, drawn-out process. Eyes become blurred. Behavior becomes unpredictable. It becomes dull. Ah, these transitory periods. After the first few weeks of being back home, I had slipped into similar lethargy. I slept all morning, and woke up in the afternoon to ponder my future direction. I had shed another skin. Another suitcase had left another hall.

Back in the Philippines, I thought about the two options that have governed my life since I was very young: here or there. A third-culture kid’s dilemma. Having been abroad for the past 6 months was invigorating, yes, but reality had come charging back when I had discovered that my company in the Czech Republic had only wanted an intern. It was time I made decisions with my long-term direction in mind, and despairingly, I thought I had simply gone back to how I was prior to my internship–back to zero.

But again, it called me. Here or there.

I kept my mind open, and applied for respectable companies within the Philippines. I suffered through that disgustingly long L’Oreal recruitment game. I visited the Ateneo Job Fair with a hard glint in my eyes. I scanned through newspapers and sites like jobstreet.ph and ph.jobsdb.com.

But as an alternative, I applied once again for AIESEC traineeships, focusing on either companies that desired to keep their intern, or countries that would be more open to giving work permits to foreigners.

And so… I was accepted into another internship, a position that called to me because it had three major things going for it:

1. It was to be located in Singapore, which is perhaps the most multicultural country in Asia;
2. The company would be Alcatel-Lucent, which is not only a multinational, but also a  major player in the technology and telecommunications industry (and therefore perfect, given my major in college); and
3. The position would be dealing with social media, a love of mine that had yet to be fully developed.

And so here I am again, typing away on my laptop in yet another country.

How good it feels.