First steps

It all started a couple of years ago, when some potential clients pressured me to start my own company. To tell the short version, I started my own translation business on the side of my full-time job, and it’s been surprisingly successful. At an exhibition this spring I spoke with a representative of one of the companies that was advertising in the magazine I worked for about possibly doing some freelance translations for them, but nothing really happened for a few months. I was really busy with some projects and didn’t really think about it. At about the same time I started to feel that I needed a change. I didn't feel challenged by my job anymore and I wasn’t really motivated. I spoke with my boss about leaving the company in the fall, and only working for them as a freelancer, which would give me more time to work with other projects as well. I was working hard to achieve my goal. The idea was to arrange my work so that I’d be living in Finland a part of the year and traveling the rest, since I’d be able to take my job with me wherever I went.

Then all of a sudden in May the representative I’d met in the beginning of the year called me and wanted to schedule a meeting. I assumed it was about the freelance translations. We met up at a café on a sunny, warm day in May and basically the first thing this representative told me, was: “How would you feel about moving to Germany? I’ve got a job for you.” It was a no-brainer. I basically said “yes” right away. Of course there were a lot of things to clear up, but I was totally in.

Since I’d been working full-time for almost three years and running my own business for about 1,5 years, I hadn’t had the time to finish my studies. When I decided to take on this new job, I realized that I’d have to write my master’s thesis before I left for Germany. So I put my summer plans on ice and decided to spend my four weeks of vacation at the university library, and so I did. I wrote 57 pages and almost finished my thesis before my new job started. (It’s still a work in progress though.) A lot of other things needed to be organized as well, but more about that in my next post.

This is how excited I was about spending the four hottest weeks of summer at the library.