For our scenario of thinking about working internationally, the international city I’d be interested in living and working in is Victoria, BC, Canada. Not far from Seattle, Victoria has a familiar feeling that I find comforting, but also has a lot of interesting differences. The things I like about Victoria include: 1. it’s on an island; 2. it’s proximity to forests and other beautiful natural landscapes and wildlife; 3. it’s proximity to the ocean; 4. the Canadian and British influence i.e. poutine, tea, and gardens; 5. it has great cycling infrastructure and 6. it’s relatively close to home in Seattle. That list can continue, but I think I’ve made my point- I like it there. The downside of Victoria (likely result of the upsides) is it’s housing is expensive, and the wages aren’t that great relative to that. This seems to pretty much be the case in most cities (definitely including Seattle) so it’s not really that big of a turn off to me, might as well live a life without savings somewhere really interesting to me. A job listing I found for this hypothetical scenario is, “Graphic Designer: Web and New Media” at Pacific Design Academy. This job intrigued me because it paid higher than many other similar postings and utilized the skills we are learning at SCCA seemingly to a “T”. The annual salary worked out to be ~$50-60k. I don’t know if that’s in line with what to expect for this field, but the seemed to be on the higher end for people early in their design careers in Victoria. Who knows maybe I’ll actually try it out there someday.
