Choosing My Next Destination

By: Abdulaziz Aldyaf

          Without a doubt, moving to a new city is a difficult decision. Over the past couple of weeks, I couldn't help but think about my next destination. Clearly there are several factors to consider that are related to the city itself and the university where I will be studying to get my master’s degree.

          Moving from Saudi Arabia to the USA is an important experience for us. Naturally, we want to get the most out of this experience. As a result, choosing what city we will live in is an important decision. There are several factors to consider. To begin with, we need to decide on what kind of city we want to live in. personally, I prefer urban cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. On the other hand, it seems that my wife have fallen in love with the suburban life style and would like to live in a small quite town. In addition, we need to consider how much it would cost to live in a certain city before making any decision. Even though I prefer to live in a big city, however it might not be a good decision to move to an expensive city such as New York or Los Angeles. Furthermore, before moving to a new city, we need to find out whether or not the new city is suitable to raise a child since we have a 9-months old daughter. Moreover, it’s really important to know what the weather is like all year long since we have no tolerance for cold cities, since we came here from a very warm city. In addition, we like to have fun, so we need to know what kind of activities are there to do since we don’t like boring cities.

          Choosing the right university is not an easy decision. Perhaps the most important factor is getting accepted, which is actually not in our hands. Another important factor to consider is whether or not the desired university has a good language institute since my wife is planning to take a long ESL program. Another important factor is that any university that I want to enroll into needs to be included in my employer’s list of approved universities. Finally, I need to find out if the university provides special programs to get professional certificates in my field - Information Security.

          Obviously there are several factors to consider but luckily we still have plenty of time before making any decision. Even though it might seem a difficult decision to make, however I’m sure that as soon as we find the answers to our questions it would get much easier.