When I graduated from university, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a degree in Psychology with a mediocre transcript, and so I did what anyone who lacks direction and has a strong love for playing in the sun – I went and got a job at Club Med where my job was playing with children all day.

  I eventually made my way to South Korea and began teaching ESL, and it was there where I realized how naturally teaching came to me, and how much I truly loved helping students learn. In 2011, after years of telling myself, “It’s too late for me to get my Master’s in Education,” I finally took the GRE and applied to Michigan State University.

  I began my journey towards receiving a Master’s degree with the belief that there wasn’t much for me to learn from a classroom environment. I was expecting a lot of theoretical information which wouldn’t necessarily apply to my own classroom, and so I was happily surprised when I was able to implement changes in my classes from what I had learned in only the first two weeks of my first course.

  While some courses have heavily influenced my teaching more directly than others, every course that I have taken has had an effect on some area of my classroom environment. Whether it’s been integrating technology into my classroom, learning how to deal with troublesome students better, or even reconsidering how I arrange my desks in order to best suit the needs of my students, I feel like my understanding of what 'teaching' truly means has improved with every step of the way.

  My goals for this journey – which consisted mainly of receiving a Master’s degree in order to validate my own teaching experience – were easily surpassed within the first few weeks. Since then, it’s been gratifying to discover how much better of a teacher I can truly be, and it’s been quite humbling to realize how much I still have to learn about becoming the kind of teacher that I dream of being – one who inspires students to be excited about learning, one who encourages the students to seek out challenges instead of avoiding them, and one who shows students how to become better people in the classroom and in our society.

  As I reflect upon the changes in my life over the last couple of years, I realize that my initial goals were quite shallow, and I can only hope that I will be able to build upon what I’ve learned from Michigan State and continue to become the best teacher that I can be.