kainzero Wrote:how difficult was it to get selected?

Depends on which country you are from. The acceptance rate for the USA is something around 20% (economy sucks yo, $40,000 tax free is appealing). Canada and the UK are around 50%. South Africa is less than 5%.

Rates are meaningless though since the selection process is not random. If you can put in a quality application you'll get through.

Womacks23 Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:misc:
Western human resource departments DO know what "teaching English overseas" is and don't take it seriously.

How exactly did I get accepted into two top 20 MBA programs if they know what "teaching English overseas" is like?

- More school is not a job. You can get into a top school program after backpacking around for years and not working at all as long as you have a decent transcript and can write a good application.
- Even if it was a job, saying how long you were an ALT would have been relevant since I did say "doing it for a long time"
- Even if you were an ALT for a long time, I never said no one ever got a good job after being a long-term ALT, just that it negatively impacts your resume since you cannot gain useful non-ESL career experience as an ALT (maybe as a CIR).

Jarvik, I got into a top -business- school. They do not take backpackers.

Keeping it on topic. You can easily get non-ESL career experience as a JET ALT if you motivate yourself to do more than the minimum. Event planning, counciling, translation, interpretation, supervising other JETs, etc.

Jarvik7 Wrote:My criterion for judging a job as "real" or not is if it requires skill and involves responsibility.

ALT is a resume killer if you do it too long because:
1) It's a job that requires no real skill, just a pulse and some degree of conversational fluency (about 1/3 of the ALT who work in the Nagoya area are not native speakers and many have poor grammar/thick accents). Any skills you DO gain are not useful for anything other than teaching more ESL.
2) ALT have no responsibilities. They are not legally allowed to give grades, assign homework, be unsupervised with the children, tell them to be quiet, etc. It may happen, but only because the JTE was negligent.

Doing it for a short time gives you international experience which looks good on your resume. Doing it for too long makes it look like you couldn't get any other job and ended up trapped. Even if you plan on going into teaching as a full-on teacher, it looks a lot worse than actually teaching professionally for most of your post-university life. Basically a long ALT history on your resume is only good for getting another ALT/eikaiwa job.

misc:
Western human resource departments DO know what "teaching English overseas" is and don't take it seriously.
International experience will help an applicant stand out against other recent graduates. It won't help them stand out against a bunch of resumes from people who have had 10 years of applicable career experience instead of 10 years of ALT.

ill give you that eikaiwa can be soulless, but if you buy into the JET program rhetoric that being an ALT is about culture exchange and "grassroots internationalization," then the value of the job is not rooted solely in classroom work. Having been here as long as I have, I have had students come back and tell me of there positive English experience in H.S. and where it's taking them now. I'm hanging out with the people in my town, which is fun but also my job. Many many times I have learned something at the same time the person I'm talking to does. Sharing a perspective has value. My job isnt English factory employee.


( on a side note, it IS legal to teach by yourself without a counter-part because by hiring you -as an individual-, the contracting organization has deemed you qualified to do so. It is a commonly perpetuated myth that speaks to the contrary. However, technically speaking, INTERAC ALTs who are not directly hired as individuals are not allowed to teach. I read an article in the newspaper here that argued that they shouldn't be allowed in schools at all. )

Most ALT are not JET, but the job is essentially the same. JETs are just paid better since there isn't a haken company taking a big cut.

It is of course possible to do more than your job actually entails, but in the end if it says "Assistant English teacher for 10 years in Japan" on your resume as your work experience, you've dug yourself a hole you're going to need to work hard to get out of.

Unless your long-term career plans are ESL, then it's a different story. If you're actually passionate about ESL I'd still recommend getting the hell out of JET/ALT/chain Eikaiwa and doing it on your own, but for entirely different reasons related to how the entire system is detrimental to both the students (they learn nothing) and the teachers (no security and bad pay) unless it's the teachers who are in absolute control.

Just looking at some of the jobs my friends have taken when they left JET makes it hard for me to believe what you are saying about ALT experience, Jarvik.

Fine then,

Interac might kill your resume
JET, not so much from what I see

That is probably because people in the JET program never stay very long - usually less than 3 years but at most 5. There is a reason for that too (it's not a job it's an exchange).

Those that move on haven't damaged their appeal yet. Those that move into haken/direct hire ALT, eikaiwa, etc and stay for a long time will.

note: Interac is not the only ALT provider, just the largest. The JET program shrinks every year since hiring via haken is cheaper, easier, less commitment, and offloads all of the responsibility to a third party. I would not be at all surprised to see the JET program end within the next 5-10 years.

Haha I agree with you then.

ALT lifers are really depressing.

Unless you move into CIR or recruitment or something for your last couple years I think 5 years in JET is a bad idea too though.. Three years seems to be the cutoff point for English-in-a-foreign-country to be a positive on your resume.

I'm going onto my fourth year as a JET... but I couldn't care less about my resume. I'm going to grad school after this anyway^^

I'm not really trying to dissuade anyone from doing JET/ALT (short term), just that people do it with their eyes open and always have an exit plan. The economy is crap after-all.

You do not want to end up as a Gaijinpot nihongirai do you?

Yeah, the economy is a big part of why I'm still here. Also, not being 100% sure what I want to study.

This is making up for my undergraduate college life, haha. My college was in a small crappy town and the people were worse than the town (it was full of stuck up rich snobs). So I'm having fun living in a fairly big city (Kyoto) and enjoying myself. Admittedly, if you get placed in Kyoto as a JET you're pretty damn lucky.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I'm not really trying to dissuade anyone from doing JET/ALT (short term), just that people do it with their eyes open and always have an exit plan. The economy is crap after-all.

I think this is key. Without an exit strategy, you could find yourself without options. Admittedly I stayed longer more because of the shit economy than my love for ALT stardom.

A friend once suggested that you think 2 jobs down the road because for most people their current employment has a big impact on their next. If you take a job that you are not suited for just because it's the only option available to you, it ll be that much harder to get that one you wanted when the economy turns around.

For an accurate and funny portrayal of some aspects of JET life:
http://www.lifeaftertheboe.com/

I think the ECC commercials with Beat Takeshi sum up English in Japan pretty well. They give the guy three or four words in English to say each spot, and he seems to really struggle with them.
"We can't even teach a professional actor to speak three words naturally"