Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Sheesh, I have a lot of applications out. But, so far I’m looking at 1) getting my old job back at Andong National University, 2) getting a contract at Woosong University Language Institute, or 3) working at a high school in Yanggu , a very small, rural town quite near (15-18 miles?) the DMZ separating North and South Korea.

I did a phone interview with Woosong University this morning and I’m confident I’ll be offered a position there, hopefully by the beginning of next week. I’ll have to read the contract before I accept, but it looks ok. Whether or not I’ll take the position depends on other factors.

One of those factors is the Yanggu position. A former colleague at Andong Univ., Barry Heinrich, from Australia, has been serving as liaison for a job at a boys’ high school in Yanggu. I’m hoping to hear from the school soon–it’s in a rural area in Gangwon Province, one of the least densely populated areas in Korea, extremely beautiful, and, of course, bordering the DMZ. It sounds almost like a Peace Corps job. Although it’s not a university position, it seems like it’s something I might want to do. Because they are so isolated, relatively speaking (for Korea), they are willing to pay well and give some other good benefits, so I’m told, in order to attract a native English-speaking teacher. I certainly wouldn’t mind working there, but, again, I have to see the contract first.

I do have many other apps in the pipeline, many of them for highly-coveted, well-paying, prestigious positions. Hopefully, I’ll hear from some of them before I have to make a decision about the other jobs I mentioned above.

It’s settled–I fly out of Casablanca for Bangkok on June 30th, come hell or high water. From there I’ll go to Laos for a week or a week and a half, then back into Thailand for most of the remainder of the trip. On or about August 15th I’ll go to Korea, to whichever job I have. If, for some strange reason, I don’t have a job there yet, I’ll still go to Seoul and camp out on their doorstep until they give me a job.

In an attempt not to have to ship box(es) to Korea, an expensive proposition, I’ve also, in addition to sending out all the job apps, been scanning many of my personal copies of books (teaching and photography titles, mainly) onto the hard drive of my laptop. Very time-consuming. I’ll give the hardcopies to whoever I can find who can make good use of them, probably some of my students. More later.

Related posts:

1. Jobs I had a phone interview Saturday morning at 5 a.m. from the U.S. I’ve applied for a position as an English Language Fellow, a program funded by the U.S. State...
2. P.S.–About Yanggu The Yanggu position fell through because, in typical Korean fashion (for at least some institutions, but not all), the director at the school didn’t really care about qualifications–to him, it’s...
3. Tropics I heard from SIT about the Burkina Faso position–it has been filled. Too bad. I am a bit disappointed, but I was aware that the competition for this one position...