Graduation: Seattle

OK, I have a confession to make. When I first got back here to Seattle, I didn’t want to stay.
There were a couple of reasons for this. Seattle is known for software and for coffee, not for finance. Given that I wanted to work in the fund world, I didn’t think there would be as many opportunities to do what I really wanted to do here. I figured I’d need to go to San Francisco or LA, or return to NYC. I also felt a good vibe from San Fran in the times I’d visited there for interviews, and I felt I wanted to have some more adventures. Seattle is my hometown, but I’m not ready to settle down quite yet, and there are other places I’d like to live. Seattle felt a bit … small, and slow paced, when I got back here, especially after living in NYC.
However, a strange thing happened as I spent time here at home. I found myself seeing all kinds of things about the city, about the beauty of this town and the area around me, that I’d never really seen before, not in all of the eight years I’d lived here previously. I feel I had to leave in order to be able to truly come back and see it again. I started remembering and seeing again all the things that make Seattle an extraordinary place. The water, the rain, the trees, the natural beauty of the city, the ethos, the pace of life, the tone, perhaps most of all, the people. I felt an increasingly strong sense of reconnection with my brothers too, but that didn’t surprise me, we have always been close. What surprised me was that I began to feel like I wanted to stay, that being in Seattle for the next few years would be great and full of unexpected opportunities. I’d promised myself that once I graduated, whatever city I ended up in, that I would invest myself into that place and those people. And now I felt that I wanted to get to know this city better, to really invest in it, become a part of the life and the culture here, get to know and embrace the city in a way that I hadn’t before. I started to feel that I really did want to stay.
But I still needed a job …