JETAA Pittsburgh

Posted by Smitha | Filed under japan

As part of my efforts to make sure I have a life while in grad school, I started looking for JET Programme alum contacts in Pittsburgh around the time I moved here last year. After some online correspondences where we started talking about reinstating the long-dormant JET Alumni Association sub-chapter in Pittsburgh (“sub-chapter,” not “chapter,” because it falls under the NYC chapter, which spans New York and Pennsylvania), several of us finally met at an information session for the JET Programme hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that we started talking about finally making this thing official.

So four of us appointed ourselves officers (I’m vice president and eventual webmaster, but these titles are really formalities), and met over dinner late last year to start discussing possible plans for stuff…and then we got really, really busy.

But finally we threw together a basic icebreaker event at a local cafe and notified the ~20 JET alums we’d tracked down around Pittsburgh. In total, including 3 officers, 7 alums and a few spouses/fiances (representing Hokkaido, Honshu [Tohoku, Kanto, Chugoku, and Kansai], and Shikoku) came out tonight. It was a huge success – I think everyone had a pretty good time, and we’re now looking forward to enjoying the beautiful nature under the sakura trees with a hanami (a cherry-blossom-time picnic) and potluck in a couple of weeks. ;)

JETAA Pittsburgh is officially off the ground, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Permalink | March 27th, 2010

One Response to “JETAA Pittsburgh”

  1. Amy Says:
    April 6th, 2010 at 11:42 am

    Smitha,

    We are currently looking for part time TESOL Instructors / Teacher Trainers in the State College area.

    I thought you and others might find this position interesting:
    http://www.oxfordseminars.com/careers/tesol.php

    If there are any questions, please feel free to contact me @ amy.compagnat@oxfordseminars.com.

    Thank you,
    Amy.

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