Moving Forward

22May09

The semester is over.  In roughly twelve hours I will graduate from Nanzan University.  And by graduate, I mean I will receive a certificate of completion.  After that is the farewell party, followed by our last hurrah at a beer garden located right by Nagoya station.

When that is all over with, I have about eight days remaining to prepare for going home… which is easier said than done.  Turns out you can accrue a lot of stuff in a period of one year.  A lot of the stuff I have here will either be packed and brought home, mailed home, or discarded.  Very few things will be packed, since my giant suitcase was pretty well full when I came here, and probably won’t have much room for the trip back.  Not all that much will be mailed either, since shipping from Japan to the US is pretty expensive;  I expect to pay anywhere from $75-$100 for what I’m sending home.  I also have to close my bank account, cancel my health insurance, and my mobile phone service.

This semester has been okay, at least as far as the academics portion of it goes.  The Japanese language classes started out fairly well for the first half of the semester.  However, as we got to about the ninth week of class, our teachers assigned us a project to work on.  And another project… and another project… and lots of miscellaneous homework.  Only some of it was helpful to learning Japanese, I thought.  That said, I do feel like my Japanese has improved a lot this semester.  I was able to write an academic report and give a speech entirely in Japanese.  However, some absences cut into my grades a bit.  Though I somehow managed to go my entire time here without catching a cold (I think I might be the only person at this point), I did unexpectedly get pink eye, which put me out for a few days – contagious illnesses can spread pretty quickly when you’re in a country with a population density like Japan’s.

A lot of good stuff happened outside of classes — nothing spectacular, but still fun.  Our usual all-night bouts of karaoke continued as usual, and my trip to Tokyo was pretty memorable as well.  We also took a trip to a very cool town in Gifu prefecture called Gujo Hachiman, which I’ll save for a separate blog post.

Anyway… moving forward.  I have one year left when I get back home.  I was not able to do an internship here in Japan, so I have to set up an internship abroad for summer 2010, right after the Spring semester ends.  If the internship goes well and on time, I should receive my degree sometime in July.  I’ll be applying for the JET Programme in September/October of this year! I’m aiming for the Coordinator of International Relations position, which means I’ll need to have a pretty strong command of Japanese.  Considering where I’m at with the Japanese language right now, I have the ability to continue studying Japanese independently when I get back home, which is good considering that there are no Japanese classes in Milwaukee that suit my ability.  I’m aiming to be near-fluent in the language by summer 2010, which is when I will (hopefully) be departing for Japan again to work in the JET Programme.   If I study at least an hour a day until then, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to get where I want to.  I think!

Well, I’ll be home in eight days.  But not until I go to Korea first!

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