Happened to move to New Zealand from South Africa, immediately met up with the Indigo Renderer guy whom I'd spoken to previously through my tutorials on an ancient website, in the FlipCode and cfxWeb days.
The main thing is actually spending a lot of time writing ray tracers... you should write your first 5 ray tracers as quickly as possible :)
Did you market yourself? Got noticed by somebody important? Started selling your own raytracer? Or maybe just apply somewhere?