Pro-Con List for My Career Options

What do I want? A big part of me wants a nice simple life in a small city not unlike Warner Robins. However, a perquisite for that is having a wife or fiancée. I think ultimately that is what I want. But in order to get to that, I may need to move to a place where there is more of a chance of finding a person to live that simple life with. I mean, practically all my friends here are married. And in the mean time, I want a very different kind of life: either a job that requires me to be sociable so that after work I will be content at home most of the time, or a more active social life after work, a neighborhood bar downstairs with a bartender I can go chill with and talk to and meet more people any time, a city I can live in without have a burning desire to travel every couple of weeks.

Boston and Montréal are the cities in North America with the highest concentration of post-secondary students, with 4.37 and 4.38 students per 100 residents. And that was before I was even considering going back to school. Just living in such an environment would be good for me instead of Warner Robins where practically everyone I know is married and the single people don’t tend to stay here very long, probably for the same reasons I am wanting to leave.

Many more opportunities to travel are coming up as well. How many of these trips I actually take should depend on what I’m going to do in the future as far as work and school is concerned. If I do stay here or get one of the 20 jobs I have now applied for, I can afford almost any trip I want and have the vacation time to allow for it this year. But if I wind up in grad school, I probably should try to save more money, because I have no idea how much I will be able to get in scholarships.

I’ve made a weighted list to compare things. There are 12 criteria, scaled according to importance, including the bridge scene, the quantity/quality of young people there, money, the weather, the potential interest I will have in the work, the friends I currently have in the various places, and what my friends/family think. Montréal scores the lowest in Friends I currently have there and Weather but wins in a landslide among places the people who know me best think I would like to live, and the vast majority of people think I should get a Master’s degree somewhere. The current results (out of 220 possible points):

165 Grad school at Concordia or McGill
152 Engineering/CS job in Montréal
136 EE job at Hanscom AFB in Boston
131 Stay at Robins AFB and grad school at Mercer
128 Stay at Robins
126 Job in Washington DC
123 Job in NYC