Study Abroad got me my dream job

My name is Brittany Partin and I decided to study abroad in Japan long before even looking into four-year universities. Once I got to Valpo as a junior level transfer student, the main question was not whether or not to study abroad, but how. I didn’t need anyone to tell me about the adventures, friendships, and personal development that would come with studying abroad, but I needed them to tell me how long and when I should go, how to pay for it, and what classes I should take to fit graduation requirements for both of my majors.  With the help of a few academic advisors, I not only managed to study for a semester at Kansai Gaidai, Japan, but I also went on a ten day research seminar trip to China—all without delaying graduation!

Knowing how fast they would go by, I fit in as many cultural experiences in as I could, and had plans almost every weekend, be it karaoke with an international cast of friends, or outings with my host family. As a student abroad, it is part of your duty to go out and explore.

The difficulty level of my language classes, however, was not something I anticipated. It was a shock when I got my first terrible Japanese midterm results, since all of the Japanese classes I had ever taken in America were a breeze. The shock, however, was one of the greatest things that ever happened in my language learning career. Kansai Gaidai was able to accommodate students at a vast range of language ability levels, and they placed me at an appropriately challenging level. For me, the challenge was a transition from enjoying foreign language classes and using it for fun sometimes to making a serious commitment to attaining fluency.

Flash forward four years. I’ve since finished undergraduate and graduate school at Valpo, attained a high level of Chinese language proficiency, and

I’m in my first year as a Coordinator for International Relations (CIR) through the JET Program in Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture, Japan. This month I did on-the-fly interpreting with relative ease for a presentation about nuclear power. Back when I was struggling with my Japanese classes as Gaidai, I never thought I’d have to use vocabulary like “nuclear fission” outside my final exam.

Working in Japan isn’t quite the same as studying in Japan (I need to cook and clean for myself instead of having a host mother to do it), and Matsue is not as busy as the Kansai region, but it’s a good fit for me and I feel I’ve prepared well for my work and lifestyle here. Little did I know at Gaidai how much the material I studied would be directly applicable to my career—for instance, the class I took about Shintoism was just out of curiosity and to fulfill my theology requirement. It turns out Shimane is the setting for many Shinto myths, and now I write comics about those myths and introduce local Shinto culture as part of my tourism promotion activities. Furthermore, my professor for that course at Gaidai is now using some of my material! That being said, I still maintain many of the international connections I made while studying abroad.

As you are reading this, it is impossible to know where you will be four years from now, but right now you do have the resources to plan the rest of your stay at Valpo effectively. Talk with your advisors about how to make studying abroad work out, and once you get there, take advantage of everything. This is your semester to open yourself up to new experiences and challenges that only a change of scenery—and language, and diet, and customs, and community—can provide. You never know what is going to prove valuable in the future, but probably more than you can imagine right now.

Because I work in the international tourism promotion office, one aspect of my job is to blog about my adventures out here, so please take a look sometime: http://saninstory.wordpress.com/ and consider the many opportunities studying abroad can open up for you!