When I began college I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career. I was 18 and just excited to start college and be on my own. I chose English as my major because it was a subject I always enjoyed and I always excelled in it. As I got closer to my graduation date, I decided to pursue teaching with my English degree and add a minor in Education. My time spent in college working towards this goal was amazing! I loved my volunteer work and enjoyed my college classes, but I still had my hesitations about teaching. Once I graduated college I moved back home and continued to chase after this career. During this time I had some really good experiences, and one bad experience that ruined it all. It was actually my former high school that ultimately stopped my path to becoming a teacher. A new vice principal at my former high school kept giving me the run around for volunteering at the school. I needed volunteer hours in order to complete a prerequisite for another program I was working towards at the time. I called him one day and explained my urgency and want to volunteer at my former high school and he went off on me and told me I should probably pursue a different career. His behavior was unwarranted and uncalled for and made me cry. I had already had my doubts if I would make a good educator(I’m really hard on myself) and hearing him say I shouldn’t pursue this career made me completely give up on the idea. 

So I listened to him and pursued a corporation job. I began as an office manager and worked my way up to being a sales representative for dental equipment. For the last three years this has been my life, and while at first it was new and exciting, it quickly got old and repetitive. I realized I didn’t enjoy being in an office all day and I didn’t like the mentality and “cut-throat” ways of sales. I didn’t find any passion or fulfillment from this job and found myself thinking about teaching again.

My boyfriend’s grandpa was a teacher and I decided to ask him about his past career. His excitement and love for teaching was adamant and he told me it felt like he was never really at work. He said it was a job that could use my creativity, my open-mindness and patience, and ultimately fulfill my need to help others. After talking to him, I knew it was time for me to pursue teaching again. This time when I began my journey I was sure this was what I wanted and I knew that my personality and drive to help others was a perfect match for teaching. I finally feel certain of my future and excited. For the first time ever I know what I want to be and how I will go about pursuing this goal. It’s really a huge relief for me and I’ve never been so happy.

When I was in preschool, I wanted to be a professional ice skater when I grew up so that I could wear the sparkly leotards that the ice skaters wore on TV. That quickly changed into wanting to be a cashier at a grocery store, which then changed into wanting to be a bird trainer (as pictured to the right when I brought my four parakeets in for my first grade show-and-tell… I seriously thought I was a bird whisperer) or a Disney princess or the best one yet – a whale.

When I got into high school, that’s when I really started to think about what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. At the time, I was still heavily involved in and passionate about music. From taking part in piano competitions and Certificate of Merit events to teaching younger children how to play basic piano songs, I always had the thought in the back of my mind that maybe I would want to pursue my love for piano and become a piano teacher. However, as a teenager, my career goals were so easily altered based off of what my peers were saying and doing. Hearing my peers say that they wanted to pursue medical school to become brain surgeons or that they had dreams of curing cancer really made me feel like some of my potential career goals weren’t good enough. My thoughts changed from “Do I want to pursue my love for piano and become a piano teacher?” to “Should I just be a lawyer? A doctor? Maybe a scientist?”. Pursuing my passions just didn’t feel good enough anymore. I started to value social acceptance from my peers over the acceptance of what I really actually wanted to do – teach.

It did not help that I was also feeling a lot of pressure from my parents at home to maintain good grades, so that I could get into a good university, so that I could get a good job, so that I could make good money and yada yada yada. Not to mention, my dad was constantly drilling the thought into my mind that I would be happy working in the science or medical field just because that is what every other Asian child I was surrounded by was doing. It was all deeply ingrained into my brain, like I was some sort of a robot just listening to what everyone else was telling me to do. I took into account what everyone else wanted for me, but never what I really wanted for myself.

Fast forward a couple years to my first year at UC Davis, where lo and behold, I carried over the pressures I felt from home and school. I chose to pursue a degree in biology to become a physician’s assistant in the future, which I knew at this point I did not really want to pursue whatsoever. Long story short, I fell into a major depressive rut during spring quarter of my second year, and had to withdraw from that quarter to avoid the major potential GPA drop from my failing classes.

During my quarter off, I went to therapy, surrounded myself with positive influences and most importantly, I got my dog, who has positively influenced my life in more ways than I could have imagined. With a lot of love and support, I decided during this time that I was NOT going to keep living for other people or making excuses or putting off my passions. I really decided to take a hold of my life and to chase the thoughts I had always kept in the back of my head. I changed my major to psychology, which is a field I have always researched and loved, and I started helping children learn piano again, which led me to babysitting, tutoring and eventually getting the opportunity to work as an assistant preschool teacher in Davis.

Fast forward again to now, and I can honestly say that I have never felt more confident in and happy with myself and my aspirations. I have really learned to embrace all that I am, the good and the bad because despite all of the obstacles, my life has led me right to where I should be. And that is sitting in bed with my best friend, Tobi curled up next to me, writing this blog post for an amazing teaching program that I get to attend at USF with some pretty awesome people (even though it is currently 1:30 AM and I have work in 6 hours).

Other than teaching what could have been an alternate career for you, and how did you come upon teaching?

From a young age I knew I wanted to become a teacher. My grandma taught kindergarten for over 25 years and I had fallen in love with going to her classrooms and watching her teach. Growing up I had always known that I wanted to teach elementary school and be as influential as she was.

Upon entering my first semester at Sacramento State I was enrolled in a first year seminar class that had an emphasis on teaching and education. As I knew this is what I wanted to do. The peer mentor that was assigned to me was very persuasive and talked me out of making teaching my major and influenced me into a more broad major, that is how I came across Communication Studies. I excelled in public speaking, loved the rhetoric aspect of what I was learning, and enjoyed critical thinking in small group work. So throughout college I thought that I would go work in a corporate office of some sort and since organizational communications was so broad I would be able to do anything. Upon graduating college, I continued to work as the manager at the retail store I had been managing for 4 years. For the longest time I believed that I would be able to continue within the retail field because I enjoyed the aspect of business, customer relations, and most notably I loved training brand new employees on how to do their job but more importantly how to conduct themselves in the work place. My district manager had sent me to help and train other at different stores so then I could utilize my communication skills and continue to have personal growth, and I figured this was great for my development within the company and to add to my skill set for the retail and corporate industries. I had looked into many careers like corporate consulting, becoming a training and development coordinator, and marketing in sports. All of those career paths seems so interesting to me while I will still managing the retail store I was at. However I thoroughly enjoyed being able to manage my own store and have the freedom of making most of my own rules, so I determined that growing in retail was my best option, I kept on thinking that my job was just like teaching but in another form. And although it was a lot like teaching because I had a sense of fulfillment because I was able to teach other valuable skills and watch their growth and graduation once they would move on, it still was not my passion and dream. In the past three years something never felt right. I thought I was happy because what I was doing was apart of what my major taught me and I felt it was what I was supposed to do but ultimately I was not happy. I had tried to push and keep myself busy into a career that was what I thought I was supposed to do based on my background education, but it was not what my heart was calling me to do. It could not have been a better situation for me personally because the store I managed closed due to bankruptcy in at the end of September 2018, allowing me to solely focus on school and volunteering.

Initially when I came to the conclusion that I would go back to school I felt that I had a few wasted years while I was working and not working towards becoming an elementary school teacher. I felt anger towards the peer mentor I had who influenced me into a different career path however now I am grateful. Now I am at a point where I have never been more sure that teaching is the career that is best for me because it is what I have been searching for to have my own personal happiness. Because teaching has now become a second career path for me I feel I got to experience what was not right in order to fully know what is right. The communication background that I have has prepared me to be a well-rounded educator for my students as well as their parents. By having the opportunity to find something more broad career I have been awarded the knowledge that teaching is what I am passionate about.