>> I went to IUPI in Indianapolis, it's Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
for my undergraduate, and I studied English there.
At the time I wanted to go into publishing, I wanted to be a writer,
I wanted to be an editor and things like that.
That's what I was interested in at the time.
I did work briefly as an editorial assistant for a journal, a medical journal,
and I found that job to be really interesting.
I liked it a lot because I also got to interact with people from different cultures
and read a lot of interesting articles
and helped them get their research published in our journal.
So for me that was something that was really interesting.
Unfortunately that job was not very well paid and at the time I needed to get some money
so I moved into doing some technical support, which the pay was better
but the job was not as rewarding.
I felt a little bit stifled in that job.
I had a lot of free time to surf the Internet during that time, which was boring, you know,
and I didn't really like it so much.
I wanted to be busy, I wanted to do some other things,
but during that time I was researching living and working abroad.
So I decided that I would try to go and get a job
and then I started teaching English in Korea at that time.
So, when I got to Korea it was my first time living overseas.
I was kind of culture shocked in the beginning, but I thought it was fantastic.
It was very interesting.
I was having a great time meeting new people, experiencing something different
and I was teaching kids at that time and just coming
into the classroom seeing how excited they were everyday just made me feel really good
and I wanted to help them to learn English.
So at that point that's when I decided I would want to get my master's degree and start to look
at being an educator and going into English language education.
I applied for a program at Indiana University that's Literacy Culture and Language Education
and the program was offered online so it was a lot of discussion online and reading,
writing some papers as well as practical application in the classroom
when I was teaching at the same time.
So I was working full-time, I was going to class full-time.
For me it worked out quite well because I was in Korea, I was teaching
and all the classes were going on in the United States during normal classroom hours.
So when I was working in Korea, everyone in the United States was sleeping.
They would start to get up in the evening when I was getting home from work so I was able
to participate in all of the discussions in the evening in Korea.
It was a lot of work, a lot of effort, but I did it in a year and a half.
I took all my classes and graduated with master's degree in education.
So, I was very happy about that and I wanted to put that to good use and I have since that time.