Soumya moved to Canada in 2021 with a childhood ambition and a business degree ahead of him. Five years later he is 27, back in India, and honest about all of it: the year it took to find a job he was proud of, the four to five hundred applications that went unanswered, three years sharing a room with a stranger, and a PR approval that never came. He does not call any of it a failure. He is back for six months around his wedding, running three Canadian clients remotely while bootstrapping a food business — and he fully intends to return.
Soumya is 27. He moved to Canada in 2021 chasing a childhood ambition, spent five years there, sent four to five hundred job applications, shared a room with a stranger for three of those years, and never got PR. He is back in India now, and he does not call any of it a failure. He also does not call it permanent.
Soumya moved to Canada in 2021, at 22, for a postgraduate programme in global business management. He had a bachelor's in IT from India behind his and, by his own description, a family that had pointed him abroad since he was a child.
His father had tried to go and could not. "I was kind of groomed that way since I was a kid," he says. "So it just felt like it's my thing." Everyone on his mother's side is in business, and he had decided early that the business he wanted to build would not be built in India.
There was a third pull, and it is the one he still defends: work-life balance. He had heard that the work culture abroad was better than what he was seeing at home, and he is unambiguous that on this point the belief turned out to be correct.
Ask him what opportunity actually meant and he gives a specific, unglamorous answer rather than a slogan.
He studied at a college that also ran an MBA programme. He was a four-year IT undergraduate. The MBA graduates had four years plus two more. Both groups were competing for the same placements. "That itself shows you the difference," he says. Two extra years of education, no separation in outcome.
He is careful not to turn this into a verdict on India. He has friends thriving here and says so. But he wanted a market where the extra effort showed up somewhere, and he did not believe he would find it where he was.
One difference he did find abroad is worth quoting for anyone weighing a move mid-career: in India, in his circle, essentially everyone starts as a fresher on a fresher's salary regardless of what they bring. In Canada, he says, if an employer likes you, you can enter at a mid-level position. The ladder is not mandatory in the same way.
He did the preparation properly. Six months before graduating he started reaching out on LinkedIn, building connections, planning to land a job the moment his degree arrived.
It took about a year to find a job he was genuinely proud of — the kind, he says, that you put on your LinkedIn.
The mechanism he describes is worth understanding, because it is not really about the job market. It is about cash flow. Most students are already living paycheck to paycheck by the time they graduate, because they have been juggling part-time work throughout. Graduation does not relieve that; it intensifies it. So people grab the first offer that appears and then wait for a better one to fall into their lap, which it does not. Eventually they quit the job they never wanted and start the real search from a standing position.
"They take whatever opportunity they're getting and then they hold on to it," he says. His point is that the pressure to earn immediately is what produces the wasted year, not a lack of ability.
He arrived with more than a fresh degree. He had run his own drop-shipping business for roughly a year before leaving India, so he had real exposure to running and managing something.
It counted for very little. "People wanted experience, but they didn't want Indian experience," he says. What employers were filtering for was Canadian experience and, he felt, a Canadian accent.
The numbers behind the search are bleak in a way that rarely makes it into student brochures: roughly four to five hundred applications, and only a couple of replies — most of those rejections. He is explicit that he would have preferred more rejections to more silence. A rejection closes a loop; silence leaves you refreshing an inbox.
What worked instead was networking, and he is emphatic about it. Which college you attend matters, he says, precisely because of who you end up standing next to. Those are the people who refer you into the role you actually want. If you are weighing a move in the other direction, the same logic sits behind the career reset a returning family went through after 20 years in Japan.
He had an education loan. His father paid tuition where he could; he worked to cover the rest and did not want to ask him for more.
Then the line that lands hardest: he shared a room — not a flat, a room — with another person for about three years of his stay. He had his own room in India. "That is not an expectation that you would have," he says.
The structural reason is hourly pay. Starting roles are frequently paid by the hour rather than by the month, so a day not worked is simply money not earned. There is no salaried floor underneath you. That is what keeps people in shared rooms and what makes the paycheck-to-paycheck pattern feel normal rather than alarming — including, he noticed, among Canadian friends who saw nothing unusual in it.
Her objection to that complacency is practical: medical bills there are expensive, and living with no buffer is a bet that nothing goes wrong.
Two reasons, one administrative and one personal.
Her visa was ending. He could have applied for an extension, but he rated the odds of refusal as real. The alternative routes were slow — learning French to open another pathway, for instance, which he is in fact now doing.
The second reason is that he is getting married in about six months. Rather than spend that window fighting an extension he might lose, he decided to come home for six or seven months, be with his family, and go back afterwards.
He talked it through with his father, who told him simply to come back and stay as long as he wanted, and with his partner, who made the argument that stuck: when else would he get this much time with his family before jumping back in?
The decision still took about six months of turning over, and it still hurt. He left the apartment, the job and the friendships he had built. And he had to leave his cat, whom he could not bring with him. For families weighing the same problem, the practical side of moving an animal is covered in the account of a family who brought a 12-year-old dog back from the US.
Asked directly whether moving back felt like failure, his answer separates two things that get conflated.
The return itself: no. He grew up abroad in the way that only living alone forces. He learned to run a household, make his own friendships, be responsible for himself in a way he would not have been in a home with staff and family around him. "I came back as a better person than I left," he says.
The immigration outcome: that is where it stung. He had studied, he was doing well at work, he volunteered extensively — and the PR approval still did not come. "I'm doing all this stuff and then I still couldn't get the PR approval." That felt, for a while, like time lost. Immigration rules keep moving, and he names that instability as the thing that made five years of effort feel provisional.
It is a distinction worth holding onto. The story people tell themselves is that going home is the failure. In his telling, going home was the growth; the unrewarded paperwork was the disappointment.
He has not treated the six months as a holiday, and this is the most transferable part of the conversation.
Throughout his time in Canada he kept one or two freelance clients alongside his full-time job — deliberately never more, so that the side work did not eat his life. That habit is what survived the move. He now has three Canadian clients, roughly 10 to 15 hours a week each, about 30 to 35 hours in total. The currency difference does the rest.
Alongside that he is bootstrapping a healthy-food company called Fifth Plate, funded from his savings, at around 20 hours a week. The target is to have it commercial before he leaves, with customers in place, then hire a business manager so it runs with minimal oversight from him.
The lesson is not "start a business". It is that the relationships and the income streams he built abroad were portable, and they were portable because he had maintained them as relationships rather than as a job.
He volunteers both sides without being pushed, which is the useful kind of testimony.
What Canada does better. Work-life balance, first and without hesitation: "3:00 my work is done. I clock out. Nobody disturbs me." After hours, he is not reachable, and nobody expects otherwise. He also rates the everyday service culture — complaints are taken seriously, people are pleasant about it — along with the infrastructure.
What Canada does worse. The job market, badly. The silence from employers. The paycheck-to-paycheck squeeze. And healthcare, which he is blunt about: a friend with a foot problem waited an entire day in emergency care to be seen, and left with a prescription for a painkiller. "Canada's infrastructure, Canada's weather, everything is amazing," he says. "But it would be much better if they had a better healthcare system as well."
Two months back in, his list is specific.
Family, as infrastructure rather than sentiment. He ran a menu tasting for around 25 fitness influencers at a farmhouse, and his cousins and sister simply turned up to help. They had their own lives and commitments. They came anyway. That, he says, is the thing that does not exist in another country.
Speed. He needed a bank account and someone came to his house to open it. In Canada he had waited days for an appointment with an advisor. Things that take three days there can take twenty-four hours here.
A genuinely hot food market. He points out that even small cloud kitchens operating out of a house are turning over what a full-time salary would pay.
What is worse. Work culture, and he did test it — he interviewed for a few roles when he got back, and got offers. He turned them down. Six-day weeks, hours of eleven to seven or eleven to eight, and pay that did not justify either. "That means 6 days of my life gone," he says. "I'll wake up, have breakfast, come to you, and have dinner at my house. There's no life."
The second thing is boundaries, and his example is a friend rather than an employer. They had agreed to meet at 7pm; the friend arrived at about 8:30, still carrying his laptop, still being called by his boss, apologising throughout. Soumya was not angry — he notes, interestingly, that five years away had made his less quick to anger — but he found it hard to watch. The friend works at a good company. The boundaries simply are not there.
The third is accountability. His mother runs a saree business; a parcel worth around ₹12,000 was lost by a delivery service, and nobody responded for five days. If you are preparing for this adjustment generally, the pattern behind why families struggle after moving back is worth reading before you land rather than after.
Asked what he would tell someone about to do what he did, he gives four things.
| Do this | Why he says so |
|---|---|
| Choose the college by its outcomes | He was told repeatedly that the institution does not matter. He disagrees firmly. The college decides who is standing next to you, and those people are the referrals. |
| Pick the course you actually want | His own programme was one he genuinely wanted — but he watched classmates pick it because it was the easy one to get into, and that choice follows you into the job search. |
| Network relentlessly | Professors, fellow students, seniors, clubs. Do not skip a club to pick up another hour of part-time pay. Away from home, the friends you build become the family you do not have there. |
| Start by the third semester | Not after graduation. Begin looking at what roles exist and what you want before the final semester closes in. |
He says he was never without work across five and a half years in Canada, and he attributes it to one specific method that has nothing to do with applying online.
Do not walk around handing out resumes. He has been a restaurant manager himself, and he is candid about where those go: into a pile nobody opens.
Instead, open a map, pick a target area, and call the places in it. Ask whether the manager is in. Ask to speak to them. Introduce yourself, say where you are studying, ask whether they are hiring. If the answer is yes, book the appointment on that call. If it is no, you have spent ninety seconds instead of an afternoon.
The secondary benefit is the one he rates highest: by the time you walk in, the manager already knows your voice. You are not a stranger with paper. You are the person who called.
Soumya moved to Canada in 2021 at 22, for a postgraduate business programme, chasing opportunity and work-life balance. It took roughly a year after graduating to find a job he was proud of, across four to five hundred applications that mostly went unanswered; employers wanted Canadian experience, not the business he had already run in India. He shared a room with a stranger for three years because entry-level pay is hourly and there is no floor beneath it. PR never came, despite studying, working and volunteering — and that, not the leaving, is the part that felt like lost time. With his visa ending and his wedding six months out, he chose to come home rather than gamble on an extension. He is not idle: three Canadian clients, about 30 to 35 hours a week, while bootstrapping a food business he intends to leave running under a manager. He rates Canada's work-life balance and India's family, speed and market with equal candour, and he is learning French because he fully intends to go back. This is a pause, not an exit.
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