I grew up in the Northeastern part of the USA in Connecticut, about an hour from New York City. Here, I attended an elementary school, New Canaan Country School, for eight years. For high school I went to a boarding school, Brewster Academy, in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. Then, for university, I moved out to the West Coast of the United States where I received my Bachelors degree in English Literature from the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. During this time, I was fortunate enough to study at the University of London for my junior year and to spend the following summer at Oxford University through Middlebury College’s program, Breadloaf School of English. I also had the opportunity to travel through much of continental Europe and the British Isles during this year.

Most of my professional life in my thirties was spent in sales and marketing. I have worked for many different types of companies ranging from executive recruitment firm for high level software engineers to working for a real estate investment firm. I decided to return to academia in 2002, where I was then admitted to a Master’s program in Interdisciplinary Humanities at San Francisco State University. In this program, I studied many different topics related to literature, culture, history, and philosophy. I fulfilled my second language requirement for my Master’s degree by translating prose from Spanish into English. Now as a teacher at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, I’m hard at work studying Mandarin with hopes of someday reaching a decent proficiency level in this language.

Prior to my arrival at BNUZ, I worked for two years through the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education teaching High School English in Seoul, South Korea. Working in Korea provided rigorous experience in teaching of English as a second language. Thus, I feel teaching there has now given me the necessary confidence to succeed in the classroom at the university level. For the last decade, I have been juggling my academic and practical careers in ways that have been challenging at times. In retrospect, however, I believe the journey has been an enriching one. I look forward to continuing this journey here at BNUZ and learning both from my students and my fellow teachers.