A small group of fabulous women I know through the American Women’s Club of Zurich started emailing around about a month ago, talking about how to help American women with their job hunts here in Zurich. I thought it was a fantastic idea (since you guys know the struggles I’ve personally faced!) and readily agreed to meet in person to discuss starting a group. Today was our first meeting and, oops, despite me mixing up the times and showing up an hour late, it was still an awesome meeting with a lot of great outcomes.
I’ll admit only to you guys though that secretly, I had an ulterior motive to wanting to meet. I’d recently been thinking about all the struggles I’d had figuring out how to find meaningful activities to pursue here in Switzerland. I also knew that every other expat had gone through a similar experience, so this is when the “Captain Obvious” flag went off in my head – why don’t we just make a website that lists all these resources in one place so every expat doesn’t have to suffer and piecemeal information by themselves? Want to get certified to be a teacher here in Switz? Boom, click here. Want to know all of the recruitment agencies in town? Bam, click here. Want to know where to volunteer? All there.
And ta-da! Enter my new support group, who (true to their purpose) were all super supportive and enthusiastic about starting this website and helping to build content for it. Now I’m overly excited that they’re overly excited! But the best part about the support group is that we all agreed the group would not turn into a bitchfest about how hard it is to get a job or how the Swiss think this way or that. Honestly, it’s exhausting to go to these networking events and hear so much negativity all the time. Newsflash: Being bitter doesn’t make anything better! (I would know, I inadvertently tried it for my first 9 months here!!).
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| This isn’t actually a picture of anyone I know but this is how I imagine we would look if we took professional pics together 😉 |
Now the real question is, how the heck do I learn how to make a website? Any tech volunteers who want to help me set up this bad boy??? 🙂 I pay in cookies!
