[KS] self introduction

kushibo jdh95 at hitel.net
Sat Jul 15 21:36:13 EDT 2000


Greetings, all!

I jumped into this list feet first (although I did spend a short time
observing topics and general behavior first, a couple hours at least), and I
guess I never introduced myself, which is customary on some lists. So here
goes... my name is Jonathan and I have lived in Korea since graduating from
the University of California at Irvine (UCI) in the early 1990s. I had never
intended to stay in Korea this long, but I ended up with two demanding jobs
that I enjoy immensely. I had been here for a couple years prior to that as
well, beefing up my meager Korean language skills (I have Korean ancestry on
my father's side) and just hanging out. I worked for the Princeton Review
(providers of irreverent, yet high quality, entrance exam prep in the US)
and they sent me to Korea upon graduation to set up their new Seoul-based
Korean franchises. It was a wash, though, as the franchise license holder
hadn't bothered to register the company legally (intending to run it from US
military facilities, in violation of USFK regulations) and she refused to
follow the advice for which she had hired me to dispense, mostly since I
looked like I was still in high school. I then decided to move on to bigger
and better things, applying to work at our mom-and-pop TV/radio network as
an "actor" (trust me, it's like participating in amateur theater in a very
very small town in a rural state) and later as a writer and program
developer. I also decided to take my US entrance test prep expertise,
Koreanize it (i.e., make it more suitable to the needs of Korean students
wishing to study abroad), and moved to Sogang University, where I enjoyed
six (mostly) great years developing the program into one of the best-known
test prep programs in all of Korea, managing to help my students get
millions of dollars in financial aid for their graduate study. In fact, I
worked with the esteemed John Harvey, who, along with Father Norbert Tracy,
built Sogang's language program into the best in the whole country.
Unfortunately, accountants with no sense of long-term planning (or even an
inkling of what running successful university programs) seized control of
the university for a while, dismantled programs, gutted budgets, and lied to
or coerced established employees in order to make them accept ridiculous new
contracts, so a whole bunch of people felt it was time to leave. I was one
of the last of them, and I have ended up at a lower-ranked university in
central Seoul (which let me move my entire program, under contract
conditions I dictated and with total autonomy). Nevertheless, I'm hoping to
return to Sogang or perhaps go to another university more easily accessible
to the general public (i.e., one near a subway station) or somehow put my
prep program on the Internet so that it's more easily accessed by people out
in the boonies (i.e., anything south of Pundang). Of course, I still work at
our mom-and-pop TV network. Last year I decided that I need a something
academic to show for my time spent here, and I entered Yonsei University's
Graduate School or International Studies (GSIS) in Korean studies. I plan to
use my biology background from my days at UCI and perhaps do a public
health-related dissertation (i.e., delve into how social mores and/or
political, economic, or social policy affect the state of medicine and
health care in South Korea). I consider myself an armchair expert on Korea,
at best, and from the posts I've seen here, I think there's a lot to learn.
Sorry for writing this all in one block, but in life there are no paragraph
breaks.

Cheers,
Jonathan


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