You can see this as a test of your love. How much are you and her willing to compromise and sacrifice to be together? If the answer is "not enough" then maybe its just not meant to be?
Not sure what do you mean by "compromise"... either I find a way to get a visa to live in HK, otherwise she would have to quit her job to meet me somewhere else (due to the 14-days quarantine rule), which doesn't sound particularly wise during a pandemics and the economic crisis related to that...
Other solution is just wait until the borders will reopen for tourists, which may take long.
I wouldn't say it's very expensive, but yes, it does cost. It's an investment that gives you future job security. It may be the best way to secure you're here by September. When you have a student visa, you're allowed to work up to a certain number of hours.
Quant jobs, I guess it takes time to learn the skills, but still possible. Likely the summer internships will already be decided and possibly messed up right now. I've heard there is a lack of Quant talent in HK, so if you could long-term work on this, it might not be a bad plan. (except, no one knows if international companies will remain here...)
Marriage and then continuing your tutoring work would be the most straightforward thing to do. Sometomes, you've just got yo get the certificate to get on with life.
Could she take leave, come to you and get married in Italy?
Everyone is stuck now so yeah... I think you just have to accept that you need to wait. Everyone had to accept this. Think about life before the commercial aviation industry... You'd never be flying around to keep up long distance relationships.
Thanks for your very thorough reply.
I'm more keen to focus on the second plan (quant job), I need to improve a bit my skills first (I don't start from scratch since during my PhD I was basically doing data analysis), but this is something I was already looking for these days. I'm less convinced about the student visa option, since it is quite expensive and seems some universities have closed their applications already... but I will search more on that too.
Unfortunately as I said at the moment she can't get out of HK, because they would require her to do 14-days quarantine when she's back, which is not possible due to her jobs. Not sure if they will remove this rule at some point.
Thanks for your words.
I don't think this is true.Original Post Deleted
There is a glut of good mainland candidates on the market at the moment, but a European candidate would still have the edge 60% of the time if the hiring manager is European
For the working holiday visa, unfortunately I'm too old (31.. they accept between 18 and 30, sigh)Original Post Deleted
Yes I left HK 3 months ago. I totally agree it's not that long time (and everything is working perfectly fine so far between us); my main concern was mostly about not having any clue about the timeline of the border closure (some countries now are even talking about not reopening their borders before a vaccine is found.. that may mean a very long time). for instance, if I knew for sure that borders would open in August (just an example), I would have much more peace of mind and I'd just wait for that. But since nobody knows that, I'm exploring alternative options, that was the meaning of my original post.
Concerning finding a job, that's also what I thought when I applied the first time for the working visa (it was with an international school), but apparently having a PhD was not enough to convince immigration department to grant me the visa.. so I'd say it's not about finding a decent job (I've worked with 2 different schools and several clients in the past 3 years), but finding the right job that would allow me to get the visa, which seems slightly more difficult
Thanks! I will have a look into that and see if I can find something.Original Post Deleted