Just in case my plans for school this next year don't pan out, does anyone have any information on dive training schools abroad? I would love to head out to Thailand, and I've researched soem of them to be at around $10,000USD for the full deal. Does anybody know of any information on good schools? Any experience with these? Any cheaper ones?
To be honest, this question comes up fairly often on SB. For that $10,000 also don't forget to add in flights, and for some centres living costs and accommodation.
From a purely financial perspective, there is very little sense in travelling overseas. You will find the training works out cheaper when done closer to home. You can also work part time (if needed) to subsidise the costs - which you generally can't do overseas.
There are exceptions, of course. If you look for centres that offer training in local currency then you may find that the exchange rates work in your favour - though such centres may not offer training in English, so it may come with complexity. You can also look at Working Holiday Visa schemes - I'm only familiar with the UK, New Zealand and Australia but I suspect other countries also have these. WHV allow you to stay in a country for somewhere between 1 and 2 years and pick up casual work for a period of that.
Something like MarineDiva's suggestion then becomes quite feasible - get a WHV for Australia, pick up some casual work to help pay for your costs and then travel around the country for a year or so and have a great life experience. I may be biased, but I think New Zealand has got better diving than Australia, though!
The questions that are often skipped over are:
1. Why do you want to do this?
2. Where do you want to go after?
I always try and encourage people to not become instructors. It's not because I don't think they shouldn't - but more to help them clarify their reasons for it. If you are thinking of this as a backup plan for School (College? University?) and not because you want to teach as such - why not just go and have a great experience? The WHV schemes are fabulous and you would get to travel around and see parts of the world that you may never see otherwise. You could, for example, spend a year in Australia then a year in New Zealand... then travel home via SE Asia. That kind of experience stands out in an application to college - it shows that you can make choices and have a bit of life experience as well (sorry, don't know your age - don't mean to patronise).
If you do have a passion for teaching, ask yourself where you want to teach. Personally, one of my concerns with instructors who learn to teach in warm water is that they often lack control when they transition their skills to teaching in colder water. Not all of them, but enough that I would tend to not give new instructors jobs in our environment. If you think you might end up somewhere cooler in the long run, then train in those conditions - then when you travel overseas it makes teaching way more fun as opposed to when you do it the other way and end up being self-focused about how cold you are.....
