Drawbacks

I spent an excessive amount of time on Factorio this morning, but I don’t think it affected me too much, as I subsequently cooked lunch and spent a solid hour reading a Japanese web novel. I’m very pleased with how engrossed I can get in web novels. They’re somehow easier than visual novels—maybe because I tend to choose somewhat difficult visual novels. Maybe if I played the typical “choose a girlfriend” type of visual novel I wouldn’t have as much difficulty.

Yesterday and today I was thinking about a few serious drawbacks of pursuing the master’s degree. I already have a Japanese visa, cell phone, bank account, documents, etc., and it’s a pain to get those. Also, just by having those I have an advantage over the majority of applicants for the job (probably). If I go home I will have some expenses in addition to the airfare, the biggest of which will probably be transportation. I guess if I work close enough, like at Food Lion, I could just bike to work, but there are days where that won’t be practical. I could get a motorbike or motorcycle, but though it might be a bit cheaper I’m not sure it would be significantly better, and I would still have the problem of getting rid of it before leaving.

Finally, I realized that doing a master’s program in one and a half years is not an easy route. I was thinking that I could work full-time or semi-full time, at least until my student teaching begins, but after revisiting that assumption it seems quite incorrect. (Maybe even planning to do it along with my ALT work is a bit optimistic, but I think I could probably pass it off for work, and maybe even get some assignments done at the junior high school.) I was hoping for an interesting experience of a full-time job and I was looking forward to the money that comes with it, but actually I think a part-time job, about 20 hours a week, will be the most that I can handle. Maybe if I look for interesting part-time jobs, I might get more excited about it, but thinking about going back to Food Lion does not elicit enthusiasm.

Even so, I still feel like I’m leaning more towards going home. I think it’s almost inevitable that I will want to teach again sometime in the future, and getting the certificate and degree out of the way now will give me a bit of a break and give me some flexibility, so if I decided to try to work outside the field of education but regretted it, I could get back to a teaching job. But right now I’m in the best position I’ll probably ever be for trying a programming job in a foreign country, so I should give it a shot.

The middle path, getting a teacher’s certificate, would allow me to stay in this advantageous position of getting a programming job in Japan while also expanding my education field potential. It’s really the best option, though it’s also perhaps the most unlikely and difficult, and for that reason I think it doesn’t seem as appealing to me. Starting a programming job while also taking education classes would also be a kind of middle route, but I would imagine that I would have to make a decision within two months. That should be enough. But on the other hand, that would also mean losing all the setup. I guess that’s mainly housing. If I stuck around long enough to make up for that while still passing the education courses, I will feel much wiser and focused and won’t have lost anything.