I’ve been wanting to yell this from the rooftops for a while, and now I can! I’ve been hired as a senior software engineer in the Nestle Institute for Health Sciences’ bioinformatics team. I start in July, and that means that Katy, Bean, the cats, the dog and I are moving to Switzerland :)
I’d sent an application a while ago when I was looking into what was available out there, post-EBI, but hadn’t really heard anything back. Then, out of the blue, I get contacted for several hours of phone interviews, followed by F2F interviews in Lausanne. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for the last couple of weeks, oscillating between “yay, OMGWTFBBQ!!!!” to “shit, what the hell have we done?!” Logically and emotionally, the upsides outweigh the downsides, but it’s still going to be a major upheaval and a sharp shock to the system. I mean, how many times in a lifetime does a job pop up out of blue and then you move to another country?
The project itself is insanely ambitious, and there’s going to be lots of work to keep me busy and happy. The project has been described as “hiring the team that will design and build a plane that’s already flying”. I’ve spoken with a few expats that are either in Lausanne from the UK or in the UK from Switzerland and they’re all mostly positive about the quality of life. There will be a bit of culture shock (everything is SO BLOODY EXPENSIVE!!!!!) but we’re actually looking forward to it.
So yeah, watch this space, because in the coming months, I might be losing my mind trying to get everything sorted out to ship all of us over there. The plan, once we’re all settled in, is to get Bean ready for school and for Katy to become a lady of leisure for a year or so while her french improves to the point where she can be a care worker again.
Oh yeah, we’re also looking for a house with a spare bedroom, in case anybody wants to come over for a visit :)