CP 6: Caitlin

I met with Ayoko at the Globe for lunch on Wednesday. This was nice because it was the day that I had planned to do all of my observations and the 1:00 class that I observed happened to be her speaking class. We just met in the lounge and chatted on the lunch break. She was really tired when we met from studying (until 4am!!!! ) for a test so it was nice to chat. She’s going to leave in 2 weeks because her semester starts in October so we are going to try to meet up as much as we can before then. I shared my Spanish/German word journal with her because she had shown me hers the week before. She thought it was really neat how I could have my German lists and Spanish lists alternating pages (I was studying the languages at the same time for awhile) but I think it’s interesting that she prefers to write her English word definitions in German because it’s easier to write than the Japanese characters.

We talked about jobs and careers. Ayoko will graduate in March and will start her job in April. She’s already got a job lined up for 8 months from now. That blew my mind. She told me she had done almost 100 interviews. I thought she was exaggerating but then she showed me in her calendar how she had kept track.  That really blew my mind. She explained how difficult it is to find a job in Japan right now and I wonder how much harder it is to find a job than here in the US.

After we ate, we walked to class together but I’ll save that for another blog since it was also one of my classroom observations.