Extended About Me (part 4 of 5)

Part 1: http://claudelaine26.blogspot.com/2016/04/extended-about-me-part-15.html 
Part 2: http://claudelaine26.blogspot.com/2016/04/extended-about-me-part-2-of-5.html
Part 3: http://claudelaine26.blogspot.com/2016/05/extended-about-me-part-3-of-5.html

During the summer after my sophomore year of college, I worked as a Team Leader for LeadAmerica’s Medicine and Healthcare conferences at Georgetown University. Being a Team Leader was one of the first indications that my career interests pointed toward student affairs, though I did not know it at the time. By interacting with many high school students coming from all over the U.S., I made it my priority to try to connect with my students, learning about their backgrounds and experiences with education. Though certain moments stick with me—leading a crowd of 75 teenagers in cheers for a half hour before a lecturer arrived, and helping a particularly quiet student come out of his shell—it was an accumulation of the small steps that I had taken all along that altogether created an amazing experience that affected me so profoundly. I entered the summer being unsure of myself in many ways, but somewhere along the way I emerged from being anxious to finding a passion in education.

Gaining first-hand insight of the potential for educators and students to affect one another outside of the traditional classroom, I returned to school that fall seeking academic and extracurricular opportunities to help me better understand how factors outside the classroom impact students’ learning. After working for LeadAmerica, I had a rejuvenated sense of leadership, taking a more active role in my on-campus activities to create more supportive learning environments for groups of students who might not have the same levels of access to resources, or working to create resources to better serve those students’ needs. Academically I focused on finding out more about the root of educational inequalities, developmental differences, and understanding how the education system could better address students from different populations. Dropping out of the pre-med track represented the first real instance of conflict with my mom, but even through all the guilt, I knew that continuing the way I had would not have been best for me. Even though I didn’t have a specific plan for what was coming next, I had developed a passion which had infiltrated all parts of my life, and very much revitalized my sense of meaning and identity through the rest of college.

After graduation, I found myself moving even further away from home, moving to Kobe in central Japan to teach English to Japanese high school students for a year. Citing reasons like “I never got to study abroad,” I went to Japan to further my dream of having adventures in new places, and also to see if I enjoyed teaching enough to pursue that as my next career step. Even though I liked creating lesson plans and felt adequate as an instructor, I soon became deeply disillusioned with my purpose in even coming to Japan. Gains in one class were never sustained just two weeks later for the next lesson, and I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to impact the students’ attitudes towards English and learning about other cultures in general. On my end, Japan was impacting the way I presented myself to others. Even though I had grown from clueless all-girl school student to more sociable girl bro, I found that my young look prompted me to almost regress to better fit the naïve foreigner image. Overall though, my time in Japan definitely contributed to my having more interactions and developing friendships with people from outside the U.S.