It all started on what seemed like a normal April weeknight in San Francisco. Little did I know it would be a night that put the wheels in motion on a dramatic change in my life. On that night Ashlee, my girl friend, tossed out the idea "let's go teach English in China." She has always had a passion for travelling and felt like teaching English would be a great way of seeing the world. Before I get ahead of myself, a little background information on myself....
I graduated college in June of 2005 with a nice job offer from Deloitte & Touche starting in September. I would be entering the corporate workforce! What a better way to celebrate the divide between finishing college and entering the world of Corporate America then backpacking through Europe and spending the money that I would make from my "real" job when I returned. Those ten weeks in Europe with my friend Mike from high school ended up being one of the greatest, drunkest, and most time spent lost trips of my life.
Fast forward, the ten week trip of a lifetime is over and its time to be a grown up and start my career. I should have know the whole corporate America thing wasn't for me as I was required to wear pants, a shirt with a collar, and what the hell...shoes... No rainbow sandals in the office..ugh...who came up with these rules? I spent 28 months at Deloitte staring at a computer screen, the wall a good portion of the time, or out a window if I was lucky enough to have one. I decided to leave Deloitte as I was sick of commuting 4 hours a day to work in a 3 walled box. For some odd reason I had the idea that moving from the public sector (Deloitte) to the private sector would change my outlook on working.
I took a job with Williams-Sonoma thinking that everything would be better, and I would LOVE my new job. I soon realized the only real difference was I had a cubicle I could now call my very own, not a storage room/file room/janitor closet that 90% of those in the public sector call home for 40-80 hours per week.
Alright, phew, those three above paragraphs sum up the the three years since I completed college. Back to this idea of teaching English in a country I know nothing about, China; Ashlee and I talked about the idea quite a bit that April night and we came to the conclusion that we would look into it further. Having a corporate job with my OWN cubicle leaves of course plenty of time for researching on Google.
Ashlee had heard of a company, through a friend, called English First that offers quite an impressive program for teaching English in China. They pay for your plane flight, apartment, and give you a decent salary. Back to Google'ing I went, trying to find out everything I could about this company. This process of trying to find out about the company and other peoples experiences teaching in China led me to wanting to create a blog on my experience.
Through my own research and with speaking to Ashlee's friend who had gone through English First we decided to pursue the next step, interviewing with the company...
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