Beyond Aspirations

A friend and veteran Director of Admissions once said to me that becoming an admissions officer wasn’t something she had aspired to be. I shared the same sentiment. However, life has a curious way of leading us down unexpected paths, and sometimes, those paths lead us to where we are truly meant to be.

My journey as a global citizen began when my father was relocated from Japan to work in the United States. I was enrolled in first grade at a public school in Texas where no one else looked like me, much less spoke Japanese. I now wonder when EAL (English as an Additional Language) programs were first introduced; they certainly did not exist at my school. By the time we repatriated back to Japan, I was more fluent in English than Japanese, and I felt at home amongst diverse classmates and teachers at Marist Brothers International School in Kobe.

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