hi there,
As my first post, I'm going to give my background info. I went to college at Michigan State, where I majored in linguistics. I studied Arabic and Japanese, though I'm by no means fluent. I have a MA from the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
I was really unimpressed by grad school, like in truth I was bored out of my mind. When you're in high school, everyone tells you how hard you're going to have to work in college, right? Bull. I think college definitely offered more subjects, and yes some of them were tough, but most were not. The same thing happened when I went to grad school. I thought for some reason this would be intense: that I'd be reading hundreds of pages every week, writing papers, hanging out and discussing semantic and syntactic properties of SOV vs. SVO languages and doing cool things with Currying, type-shifting, etc. Instead, I was greeted with a slow program, and classes that were all easy and not even very interesting. I discovered that the university wasn't even particularly geared towards my major research interests, despite what I had heard from others. I had traveled over 4000 miles and gone 30,000 dollars in debt in order to be bored.
Needless to say, that experience turned me off of continuing my studies anywhere. My brother was just about to begin his grad studies at the University of Virginia. He asked me to tag along so I could help keep his rent low, and as I had no long term plans, I agreed. Shortly, I was introduced to his fellow grad students, who promptly offered me a job at their lab. Since some of the RA's and others there (hi guys) will no doubt be reading this, I'll omit my time there: you all know what I did.
Two incidents changed my plans. The first was my brother and I had a tragi-comic falling out at the beginning of January. The second was several hardware-software failures at the lab. The falling out made me start thinking about seriously moving out, and the problems at the lab began costing me serious money due to lost hours.
So I applied to several companies that hire people to teach English in Japan. I had been putting in entry-level applications to video game companies for months, but had heard nothing back from them, and figured these applications would be the same. But within less than a day, I had been contacted and asked to set up the first of several phone interviews.
Things moved pretty fast, and soon I was offered a position. I'm currently waiting for some paperwork to be completed, and then I can move forward with my Visa application. As I complete amazingly tantalizing forms and bureaucratic procedures, I'll be updating my progress here.
Once I get over to Japan, I plan on updating this with grocery shopping, setting up an apartment, and what the job is like.
Cheers
