Why I Quit College and Moved to Norway
I Moved to Norway Aged 19 for Work, and Found My Motivation
At the age of 19, I quit college and moved from the UK to Norway. It was one of the most impulsive moves of my life, and it was the best choice I ever made.
I had reached the end of my motivation with school, it had been waning for a few years, but this time I was done. I had just started my second year of college, having managed a good result in the first year of a Physics degree. However, I couldn’t find the motivation to get stuck into my studies again after the summer.
I followed a dream to work in the gaming industry.
In hindsight, I had decided to quit much earlier in the summer. I went back to college because I hadn’t followed through on the decision; I had applied for only one job. Then a few weeks into the new semester I got an offer for the job in Norway.
It was a dream job for me. I had volunteered for the company and built a training programme for their customer service team; they had just launched a new massively multiplayer game called Anarchy Online. The product launch had not gone very well, but they were impressed with the work I had done.
Through my teens, I had dreamed of working in the gaming industry. I had several unpaid roles, including the EQ Guides, Advisors of Rubi-Ka, and I wrote for several years in UO Stratics, AO Stratics and the Pacific Shard Times.
My recommendation to anyone looking to get into the gaming industry is that you need to spend time immersed in the industry. Writing on fansites and doing volunteer work will help you build contacts with the companies. It isn’t enough to “love games”; you have to go beyond that. I got the opportunity with Funcom because my volunteer work led to a recommendation.
My first job was in customer service, and I found ways to grow beyond that.
My parents thought I was crazy.
My Mum was furious, no one in my family had ever studied for a degree before, and I was going to be the first to complete one. She was a nurse, and my Dad was a plumber, they wanted something better for me. However, persuading my Mum was vital because she held the purse strings in the family.
Fortunately, the job offer included rent for the first month, but I needed to find a place to live and cover my expenses until the first payday. I had to get my parents onside, or it wouldn’t happen.
I was lucky that they agreed to pay my expenses, once they understood that it was a real job, with a proper company and an actual salary. It helped that the salary looked pretty good by UK standards. My Dad was keen for me to get out into the world, and not just live behind a computer screen.
After quitting college, I had three weeks to prepare for the move. I moved all of my stuff in two suitcases, and off I went. I had no idea how expensive, cold, dark and different my life would be.
It changed me for the better.
I have written about how Scandinavian business culture is a part of my company today; it impacted me at a very impressionable time.
I was fortunate in some ways that the company I worked for had many opportunities to grow. Most of my colleagues took the job intending to be game designers; I threw myself into becoming the best customer service person that I could be.
Ironically, the company had taken many of the training manuals that I had written for the volunteers and used them to train customer service staff. So I became the defacto training person in my first week for the other new starters.
In the first three months, the software developer that maintained our customer service tools left the company. Amid a hiring freeze, his role was left vacant, and I asked for the chance to work on the tools code. That second opportunity has shaped my entire career. I spent the next 15 years writing code for the company in a variety of roles, including as part of the management team in the company.
There were times that I felt overlooked, my colleagues got opportunities to work with the game design team, but I grabbed other chances when they became available. There were times when my boss said: “No, I don’t think you are ready for that”. In each case I went back a few days later and said: “I want to do this, how do I show you that I’m ready”.
Each time I did that, I got the opportunity in the end.
I went back and finished college.
A college degree has two functions; it opens doors and raises your ceiling in life. I had completed the first year of my degree, and I needed to decide whether to go back or lose that year of work.
After two years of working in Norway, I approached my boss and said that I would like to move back to the UK and finish my degree. In my mind, that would mean leaving, he had other ideas and suggested that I could work remotely.
My friend that had recommended me was moving to a new role in the company, which meant that there was an open position to run the volunteer programme. I could work remotely, and over the next two and a half years that enabled me to pay for college without my parents help.
My academic record was far from perfect, but I was the first person in my family to complete a degree. My father was incredibly proud that I read the degree-awarding rules and found a way to cut six months off my degree by avoiding a retake.
After completing the degree, I moved back to Norway and into a new role in the company, building on my coding skills. I stayed with the company for another ten years.
I was lucky in many respects, the company downsized just a few months after I started, but I kept my job. It could have quickly gone very wrong, but we are the sum of our decisions, opportunities, experiences and ambitions.
I quit college because I knew that I had reached the end of the academic road at that point in my life. If I had stayed, then I think I would have failed my second year and never finished college. A change in scenery, a fresh perspective and new opportunities meant that I was able to go back with fresh motivation to finish college.
