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I'm just securing an EPIK position (destination as yet unknown), but the bit about "buy your electronics in North America" kind of has me alarmed. How big of a markup is this? Right now my main computer is a desktop, and I was planning to buy a lower-end gaming desktop when I got there. Is this A Bad Plan? Also, I haven't been able to find anything about internet quality in rural areas, as I suspect that EPIK wants to send me to one of those far-flung locations. Is rural internet poo poo, or will I be able to continue my online gaming and shitposting lifestyle from (worst case scenario) some island in the Lastly, if I don't drink, will the soju-swilling masses think that I'm strange?
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Jul 14, 2015 17:45
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I'm in National EPIK. Put Daejeon as my first choice, on a friend's recommendation from what was available, but I also told them that I'm willing to go anywhere. In the 2am skype interview, the interviewer mentioned some island, the name of which I didn't quite catch because it was late, I was tired, and the interviewer was speaking quickly and rapidly moved on to some other topic. I now suspect that they want to send me to the mystery island because I expressed a willingness to be flexible. Oh I hate laptops. I'd much prefer to build a PC. Maybe what I'll do is take my GPU and hard drive from my current desktop, and then just get the rest out there.
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Jul 15, 2015 00:06
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Grand Fromage posted:If you have a masters have you thought about getting teaching certified so you can do international schools? I actually have a doctorate in English, but I'm so sick of universities right now that the thought of getting a B.Ed makes me contemplate suicide. I'm in desperate need of change. This EPIK gig seems to me like the fastest-accessible not-a-scam route to a radically different life than the one I've lived for the last 7 years.
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Jul 15, 2015 02:21
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Whizbang posted:
 all you want, but the academic job market is complete poo poo right now, especially in the humanities, and I refuse to sit around unemployed. I'm going to have to move out of the city I'm in anyway, and so if I'm going to make $20,000 next year, I'd rather get a fresh start out of it and jump on a chance to travel. I'll spend a or two year doing the EPIK thing, apply for post docs and other positions, and see if I secure work at an Asian university.In fact, I know for a fact that I'll make more money doing EPIK than I would staying where I am and fighting for part-time positions.
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Jul 15, 2015 02:44
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Let us English posted:He's not saying you should go into academia in the US. That doctorate could get you $50,000 abroad outside of Korea. The problem is that all of the positions I've been seeing have the longer hiring cycle - I need something to do while I'm trying to secure that next, better position. It's not as if the EPIK thing is a 5-year commitment. It's also quite possible that I just suck at looking for jobs.
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Jul 15, 2015 02:50
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah doing EPIK with a doctorate in English is a terrible idea. You're going to hate yourself. There are plenty of university positions that hire for a year or two at a time, also you can just quit it's not like it's prison. Ok, I just went and combed through a few thousand job postings again, and there's nothing resembling this anywhere - "$50,000," begging for doctorates, university, &c. Are the resources I have just awful and broken? Point me to where these jobs are advertised. Everything I'm seeing is garbage, even next to the EPIK pay package - stuff like ESL teaching, minimum 5 years experience, already have work visa or residency, $1100 USD per month kind of poo poo.
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Jul 15, 2015 16:52
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I'd rather avoid getting into any  about why I'm an idiot for making the decision I've made. I personally know eight or nine people who have done EPIK, some of them many times over, and most of them are also grad school types. I'm close enough to some of these folk that they would speak up if they thought I was doing something boneheaded and misery-inducing. They're not saying anything remotely like what I'm seeing in this thread. If you're having a bad time, my condolences.I've been combing through ads on international job boards, academic job boards, and places like Dave's ESL Cafe (which site I find disappointing). Good to know that the universities don't actually advertise the jobs in any of these places that I'd expect to see them. I have a Korean friend-of-a-friend who knows more about that, so I'll push through that channel a bit more. Yes, I hit my head hard recently, but I had applied for EPIK before that. I'm avoiding the Middle East, the Gulf especially, for political and climate reasons. I like being outside, and I'm pretty sure that it would take me five minutes to die in that kind of sun. I find it pretty depressing when I see a vertical list of "Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates" positions, but that's how it goes. A good friend of mine is doing one of the Kuwaiti university jobs right now, and that looks like a nightmare of direct sunlight and authoritarian government to me. I don't care if it pays 3x as much as EPIK - it's not worth it to me. I've been looking at positions worldwide outside of that. I had an on-campus interview for a tenure-track job pretty far north in Canada this spring, and I didn't get it. I've also been watching Nunavut/NWT postings but nothing in my wheelhouse has opened up. EPIK was always the backup plan if none of these other trees bore fruit. I absolutely 100% know that I'll be working with kids, and I actually already volunteer time to work with kids now and then. My general plan is to do a year of EPIK to get some super low-effort cash working with kids instead beating my head against the wall for entitled teenagers at a Canadian university. I don't care if I have to work in someone else's classroom. I've been a TA 10x and I know how to let someone else drive. If I'm liking Korea/Asia generally, I'll then begin to hunt for one of these better, university positions for year two, ideally teaching English as literature instead of (or at least alongside) ESL.
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Jul 16, 2015 16:03
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think you're an idiot, I just don't understand why someone qualified for the top rungs of the ladder would want to work at the bottom but it's your call. Hong Kong public schools are also worth a look. HK is awesome and pays a lot better. Well the catch is that the better jobs I've seen listed have been specifying graduate degrees in Education, not in Humanities. I'm BA, MA, PhD, without any kind of B.Ed or M.Ed. They also want formal ESL teaching experience. I don't have much ESL experience besides dealing with the ESL students who have come into my essay writing/literature classrooms. Right now my biggest value in this education environment would be in working with ESL students who wish to study abroad (evaluating how they'd actually do in a real English-language university), and I plan to look for that kind of work on the side, outside of the EPIK work. All of this might be moot anyway, because the recruiter has gone completely silent and not responded to any followups, so gently caress me, right?
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Jul 16, 2015 16:21
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bringmyfishback posted:I didn't call you an idiot. Yeah it wasn't you who called me an idiot, but it has happened a few times in the thread in quick succession, so some bristles came out. What is Gnet? Google isn't helping me. Too many varied results.
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Jul 17, 2015 03:05
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Will Korea be difficult for a tourist with a dairy allergy?
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Feb 24, 2019 05:43
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Gildiss posted:Few places could be easier. Cool. Thanks. The AFP thread was showing me tons of horror story Korean food with unaccountable piles of loose corn and creamy poo poo on top, which is presumably mayo, but I wasn't sure, so I figured I'd ask.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Is mayo. Bad cheese in things is a Korean trend but traditional food uses no dairy. Will it be easy to avoid the bad cheese in things for the most part?
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Feb 24, 2019 06:35
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Gildiss posted:As a tourist are you coming to eat the local food or the caricatures of western food? I'm not the one going. My 65 year old mom is spending like 40 days there, mostly in Busan and Jeju. She has a bit of an orientalist impression that Koreans don't touch the filthy dairy which makes her react, because it's not part of their ancient culture. My posting experiences teach me that this is false - I'm just trying to get a bit of info for her so she doesn't chow down on something that has a bunch of non-obvious dairy in it and then have to blast herself with prednozone for two weeks while on her vacation. She's happy eating local food - is it a good rule of thumb that if it looks non-western that it almost certainly won't have bad cheese in it, and that most of the added dairy is really obvious? e. and will it be like Thailand where it's really hard to get black coffee because everyone drinks instant with sugar and powdered milk pre-mixed? CommonShore fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 16:08
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 08:08 |
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Grand Fromage posted:Basically. If there's cheese it'll be labeled as having cheese. Thanks much!
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Feb 24, 2019 16:24
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