Office to ocean: Woman moves overseas to work under the sea in BC
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Written for Daily Hive by Samantha Xia Symonds, a British Singaporean Chinese communications consultant and dive instructor based in Vancouver.
I knew my career was going to be complicated ever since winning a dream internship as a student. To overcome the terror of drowning, I had recently qualified as a scuba diver when my prestigious advertising agency assigned me my first brief – restoring consumer faith in an oil and gas company after their infamous ocean spill. I felt morals and money splitting my unfurling career in opposite directions.
Hoping to apply my creative writing skills to a profession aligned with my values, I became a marketer for UK charities and non-profits. A highlight was showcasing the talents of young diverse and disadvantaged creatives to help them secure opportunities in the arts industry, which felt particularly meaningful coming from a working-class background.
Rewarding as it was, my life changed trajectory as my twenty-fourth birthday approached, ending my long-term relationship and engagement. Growing up visiting family overseas, I had always wanted to experience a life outside of England. I let my personal challenges become my professional catalyst to finally leave my landlocked city and explore a career over (and under) seas.
The price of paradise
Following my Singaporean Chinese heritage, I travelled South East Asia on a kind of working sabbatical of self-discovery; I collaborated with Thai animal rescues and trained as a professional diver in Bali before becoming a field scientist and dive instructor in Fiji. In Viti Levu, my boss added content strategy to my role after discovering my marketing prowess. Woah, I thought, my unrelated skills and passions just demonstrated their value collectively.
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Working with village chiefs to restore mangrove forests in the only plastic recycling project in the country; tagging stingrays and diving up to eight times a day, sometimes with 40 three-metre bull sharks, or dropping baited remote underwater video cameras; and recruiting and mentoring voluntourism participants… Over six months, living three hours from the nearest supermarket or gym (and catching multiple tropical diseases), I experienced the true cost of this adrenalin-filled lifestyle.
My Fijian dollar income, while sufficient in-country (alongside company-provided accommodation), didn’t offer long-term stability when converted to British pounds. A simple visit home for Christmas would be hard to afford. Privileged with my passport, I utilized Australia’s Working Holiday Visa and crossed the Coral Sea with the last of my savings.
Commonwealth meets common sense
Back in Malaysia, dive instructors could be paid five Ringgit (C$1.40) for each diver they guide. In one day on the Great Barrier Reef, I earned the equivalent of a whole month’s tropical salary! Armed with a résumé now reflecting the breadth of my experience, each of my Aussie dive jobs over the next two years included an element of communications, writing, or marketing, whether booking five-day live-aboard boat trips with Mandarin speakers, training stingrays for educational aquarium tours with Vogue editors, or creating social media content of my team and me taking celebrities diving in the local shark tank.
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In 2019, I’d saved enough for that festive trip home to England and more. Once back in Birmingham, UK, of course, 2020 had other plans! COVID lockdowns sank the tourism – and dive – industry for the foreseeable future, so I found refuge in the creative writing I had left behind. Building my website and opening to clients, I learnt my most valuable lesson – I didn’t have to choose between economics and ethics. They were not mutually exclusive as a communications consultant.
From nature poetry to training AI models and ad campaigns for lifesavers, freelance writing didn’t just let me choose projects I felt excited by, it offered autonomy to turn down jobs at odds with my values and prioritize causes I felt passionate about supporting. Within two years I was making $70,000 contracting for international companies and charities from forests in France and beaches in Bali. Knowledge of global work cultures from my travels helped me to specialize in localization, tourism and internal operations. Word by word, I had begun a business.
BC: The best of both
Managing nine clients alone, the freedom of a remote business eventually juxtaposed with the disruption of having no fixed workspace. Seeking a base, BC beckoned, with easy access to nature and the ocean, stable healthcare, and familiar Asian culture – many of the elements that had captivated me about Sydney. Arriving in Vancouver’s 2022 July radiance square-eyed from 80-hour weeks, my mind felt numb, spending every day behind a computer. I craved time in water and in-person interaction; the combination of the pandemic and working from home eroding my sociability.
Now, almost two years later, I’m hooked and settled. Vancouver offers a stunning middle-ground, where I work part-time supervising the dive operations at a large tourism attraction, collaborating across departments, training teams, and maintaining underwater equipment and animal exhibits, and then write and consult in my evenings and days off – in October, Canadian Geographic is publishing my feature on local jellyfish blooms, and in spring, I organized the return of an annual divers’ event, which saw over 6,500 attendees and 40 industry organizations and professionals visit our facility for a project that married all my skills together.
Best of all, this environment has afforded me space to progress two life-long goals: starting travel businesses with partners to share the workload and writing a book on how the ocean can be a source of resilience, especially for neurodivergent people and trauma survivors.
Including all its twists and caverns, I’m grateful for my unorthodox career path. The strengths and reflexes you develop from navigating unusual spaces are rewards that run deep beyond the workplace.
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