Joe In Japan REBORN! 復活だ！
Hey everyone!
超久しぶりね！Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written on this blog. There’s been a variety of reasons for that, not the least of which is that I just had my final year of classes here at the University of Maine. The fall semester was a tough one, since I was taking nothing but high level English classes. I was reading two books or so a week and writing several papers month. If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, well, too bad ’cause it was a lot for me. (￣−￣) This past semester wasn’t quite as bad, but I did have my final graduation paper hanging over my head the whole time, affectionately called a “capstone.”
But now that’s all over! Yesterday I handed in my lovely capstone, today my final Shakespeare paper and next week I only have one actual final (I have two others in Japanese and Korean, but they’re so different I wouldn’t call them “finals”). Being as such, I now have real time for myself again, which means I can start writing here once more. However, since this blog is titled “Joe In Japan,” I wouldn’t have considered it appropriate to continue if it wasn’t for one little fact:
I got into the JET Program as a Coordinator for International Relations!
If you follow my twitter then you already know this. Yes, kind readers, yours truly will be returning to work in Japan come August. A whole new set of challenges and adventures are sure to await me and I’m going to be taking you all along with me once again via this blog. My life as a JET, my life in Japan, it will all be here in the form of blog posts, pictures and videos. In particular I want to focus on that last one. I’ve been watching tons of Japan vloggers over on YouTube these past few months, especially those by people who were/are on the JET program. They’ve inspired me to start my own vlog, so starting sometime soon I’ll be posting videos to this channel, focusing on life in the JET program as a CIR: http://www.youtube.com/JoeInJapan86. Please, feel free to subscribe. I know there’s nothing there yet but there will be, I promise! I really do!
I thought that I would use the rest of this post to touch on my experience applying to the JET program. The best way to hear about this would be head over to “English Teaching in Japan,” a podcast run by Chaz Wright. Chaz is, wait for it, an English teacher in Japan who talks about his daily life and the experience of being a teacher over there. A couple weeks after I finished my interview for JET in Boston we sat down on Skype and talked about my time as an exchange student in Hirosaki and then specifically about my journey from the JET application phase to interview. Listen to it here:
My interview on “English Teaching in Japan.” Thanks Chaz!
One final thing I’ll be doing today. Yes, that’s right, today. I’ll be posting my Statement of Purpose, the essay part of the JET application that asks you to explain why you want to go to Japan and what kinds of skills and experience you have that will contribute to JET. Since I got accepted into the program, they must have liked it at least a little bit.
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks so much for reading and supporting me while I was an exchange student in Hirosaki! I hope that we can have some great times together again starting this August. :) じゃあ、な！
Themocracy
Nice due
Dude*