I’ve been waiting to write this post for over 2 years! I still remember when it finally hit me: I was about to graduate college and everyone around me was stressing out about internships and landing their dream job right out of college. But…

I didn’t know exactly what my dream job was. Raise your hand if this was you at the end of undergrad?

I was about to earn my degree in fashion merchandising but I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to use it. But I knew that I hated being back at school after my year abroad in Italy. I knew that the best year of my life was the one where I pushed myself outside my comfort zone and got to live in a new city, on the other side of the world. So I decided I would do that again.

As soon as I promised myself I would live abroad again, it was all a blur: I started to research countries and figuring out how I could make money while living abroad and then one of my best friends told me about how she was earning her TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate through The International TEFL Academy So I researched average salaries and costs of living and started building my savings.

Over two years later and after working two jobs, then one job and a 10-week TEFL certification course, a part time job assisting an ESL professor at the local Community College, and a ton of planning and research, I am officially a certified ESL teacher and I will be moving to China at the end of August to teach English at a kindergarten!

I am so excited and so proud and I honestly have not come down from the high I got after reading the email that said a kindergarten wanted me to teach at their school.

I will be gone for at least a year, teaching in Shenzhen, China. My plan moving forward is fairly simple: teach English in China, maybe stay in China? Maybe go to another country? With insanely large student loan payments, I will probably stick to teaching in Asia and the Middle East for the time being. And then who knows where the wind will take me?

So all I have to do now is say thank you to my family for allowing me to live at home to save up, to my friends for their endless encouragement, to my ITA advisor who pointed me towards China, and to anyone that believed I could do this. I am incredibly excited to begin this new journey. I’ll be writing about every single adventure, all of my tips for how to avoid the mistakes I’m going to make and, above all else, I’m going to share my own love for learning with as many people as I can.