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Managing Director of Global College Counselors Ltd and Past President of OACAC David Allen recounts his decision to move home to the UK after twenty years of working internationally
I had always considered that my wife and I were to be ‘career expats’. We first went overseas when we were both fresh out of university and seeking our paths in life. My first post was in a small English medium school in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and my wife’s as an au pair in Athens, Greece.
Unbeknownst to each other, after two years of living where we did we both applied and were accepted to teacher training college. Finishing our third years abroad we came home to the UK for the one year course, both determined to get overseas again as soon as we could.
Our first taste of the ex-pat teaching life was in Spain’s Canary Islands and we had three wonderful years there building up experience and getting very good tans! From there, we moved to Saudi Arabia for the first of our two stints there, staying six years in Jubail - a small fishing village that had been converted into a major industrial city. From there we moved to a large British school in El Salvador. I now had my MA and had delusions of adequacy as an educational manager and so we ‘needed’ a bigger school. Three years in El Salvador gave me some experience in management and a desire to return to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia specifically, in order to feel ‘safe’ once again. So Jeddah was where we ended up and, although we moved schools after two years, we ended up staying put for a record spell of eight years.
During our first spell in Saudi we had been fortunate enough to buy our house and over the years that followed that purchase we changed, stripped, stained, varnished, waxed, wallpapered and painted just about everything we could until our house was just the way we wanted it. It ended up so perfect in fact that we decided it was time to make it bigger! By summer 2009 that extension was finished and we did some more waxing, papering, varnishing and painting and, over the Christmas vacation in 2009 - it was Christmas Eve, in fact, when we took delivery of the last of our furniture - we finally had our house perfect. Leaving the house at the end of that vacation was for me quite an emotional parting. I had previously been the one to think, ‘that’s it, holiday over, now back to work’ without much of a second thought about leaving home. Bu thits time I teared up!
We had been considering our options in Jeddah for a while before the extension was finished. Neither of us wanted to move to another country, yet we knew we couldn’t stay at the school indefinitely – it would have been very easy to stay but there is a premium that must be allowed for one’s sanity! It was decided then, we would move back to the UK and live in our home, on the beautiful Orkney Islands, permanently.
That decision was probably one of the easiest we have made. For those of you working overseas, you will know when it is right, you just feel it in your bones – your passport may be full, one of your two buckets will be certainly full (you all know about the two bucket principle, yes?), or you may simply have a yearning for a ‘normal’ life at last.
Once the decision was made, the next question we needed to address was, what are we going to do? It is a lovely idea to ‘take a year off’ but we are not all fortunate enough to have the means to do this. It was a question that I must say led to a few disturbed nights’ sleep, but I was encouraged by my wonderful colleagues in the college counselling field to continue with what I had been doing. That is to say, being a college counsellor and organising tours of UK universities for counsellors, and expanding that to include international school groups.
February was a big month for my wife and I; not only did we reach ‘the point of no return’ in regards to our resignations, but I incorporated both Univisits and Global College Counselors as limited companies in Scotland. Univisits Ltd will now act to serve the international school population by organising bespoke tours of UK and Irish universities, with an additional service offered to counsellors of one tour per year of a selected area within the UK and Ireland. Global College Counselors Ltd is a bit more difficult to explain succinctly.
My fellow board members of the Overseas Association for College Admissions Counseling and colleagues on the Presidents’ Council of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, have been wrestling with issues surrounding the increasing competitiveness and commercialisation of higher education. Whilst clearly many, many students and their families are getting good service from their (overworked and underpaid) high school counsellors, there are some that find that an independent counsellor is their best source of information and help with this critical stage in a young person’s life. Knowing this, and that there are an increasing number of less than qualified and even unethical practitioners out there, I formed Global College Counselors Ltd to act as a consortium of highly experienced and ethical independent counselors. My fellow Director and I are both committed to working in the best interests of the students and their families and to that end, we are hand picking our associates from known and trusted colleagues, who are based all over the world, in order to maintain the highest standard of practice. Global College Counselors Ltd.’s ultimate aim is to be in a position so that any student, anywhere in the world, is within one time zone of one of our associates.
So far, it has been nothing short of wonderful. We are both enjoying the autumn and seeing the leaves change for the first time in two decades; even our first snow hasn’t fazed us. Sure, there are days when I have a ‘wobble’ and wonder at the wisdom of leaving a regular income behind during a recession, but each time I do I contact one of my colleagues. They remind me of the huge need for the services that both Univisits Ltd and Global College Counselors Ltd can provide and I 
knuckle down once again to raising ‘brand awareness’ for my companies and just occasionally during a mammoth emailing session one of our cats will jump up on my lap and purr contentedly as if to say ‘thanks’ for moving back. They certainly enjoy the cooler weather and abundance of countryside creatures to hunt. Sometimes that’s enough.
I think if there’s anything to be taken from this move is that once you have made the decision, then perhaps the hardest thing to do has been done. Once made, it has been very easy for us to adjust to our new, ‘normal’ life and at this particular moment in time we have no regrets at all.
Written by David Allen (2011)
Managing Director
Global College Counselors Ltd / Univisits Ltd
David Allen has worked in international schools for over twenty years and has extensive experience with US, UK and Canadian college/university admissions processes. He is a former president of the Overseas Association for College Admissions Counseling and is an associate member of the Independent Educational Consultant Association.
