I am in my second year in this school, studying General Art and Science. I was born in South Korea and spent decades of my life in Seoul. I moved to Vancouver with family about ten years ago. Now, I am a housewife, a university student, and a mother of two children. That means I may appear to be an old colored female immigrant, who is jobless and non-native in English: the worst profile in a society at a glance. However, I define myself as a lucky intellect who is culturally abundant between two totally different societies. In addition, I define myself as an avid lifetime learner. My intellectual history consist of five parts: childhood, campus life, bank career in Seoul, and then raising children, continuing education here in Vancouver.

First, I grew up and was educated in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, in which there are numerous layers of cultures at the same time: traditional values, modern technologies, conflicts of all kinds of ideologies, coexistence of various religions, etc. I was showered by all the mixture of those cultures in Seoul and Korea. Seoul has been the capital of Korea for more than five hundred years and its own population is over ten million people. The culture in South Korea is a microcosm of modern development in the world, because Korea went through rapid development within a century from a traditional agricultural country to one of the most developed ones. For example, my grandmother was born in Chosun dynasty, my mother was born in Japanese colony, and I was born in the Republic of Korea. As for my children… I guess their identities are already changed as global citizens, quite a long time ago.

Although I was a typical Seoulian and Korean myself, I always felt curious about other part of the world; the difference of values and ways of life in other cultures kept amazing me. My second history of knowledge was majoring in English Education. To me, studying English is like opening a new door to enormous cultures all over the world. If I might learn French, German, or Japanese languages, I would be only able to access that specific culture. However, English seems different; it is like the melting pot of all the cultures. Thus, I decided to major in English. Since I needed a stable job, I eventually became a student of English Education that mainly consists of English literature, linguistics, and pedagogy. I was quite good at study; yet, the literature selections did not look much relevant to me, and those practical classes were not inspiring. Instead, I literally lived in the school library and soaked up whatever interested me for four years. That was my happiest time in my life.

After graduation, I went into business and worked in the consumer banking sector in two foreign banks for fifteen years, from which I learned almost all branch functions and many of the administrative tasks in the head offices. English skills and lecturing skills helped me succeed quite a lot. However, the most interesting work to me were quality improving projects that define loopholes in processes and rearrange the workflows to improve customers’ experiences. Those projects require lots of surveys, measurements, redesigns of the workflows, policy changes, and sometimes investing in equipments or technology. Above all, it requires all the stakeholders’ cooperation just as Liberal Study emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches. All those business experiences are still big part of myself, contributing to current values and thoughts of me. They are the third period of my biography.

The fourth one was a big leap to me. I moved to here in Vancouver with my family and started another life as a housewife and mother of two children. One kid was in grade 5 and the other was entering the elementary school. Everything was different than before. The most difficult thing for me was to have conversations with other moms. Catching their emotional ques and implications were really difficult because of cultural differences. Until then, I didn’t recognize that business English is very dry version of the language, merely focused on tasks. However, conversational English in everyday life was fluid; sometimes slow, sometimes fast, unpredictable where to direct. I tried to catch everything up to implications, but the cultural contexts were really different. Anyway, I thought I was also growing and learning with my children, and tried to read English books as much as possible including magazines and newspapers. I volunteered to various school works, such as hot lunch, garden sales, reading moms, class parents etc. In the meantime, I fell in love with baking and cooking. I attended weekly cooking classes for a couple of years, and later watched a lot of cooking videos and taught myself as a hobby. It was a relaxed and fun period of learning about another culture.

The final period of my intellectual journey is these days at Capilano University. Now I am studying in the Associate Degree – General Art program. As my children grow up, I can spend more and more time on my own. Learning something new is the most valuable and inspiring thing to me. I wanted to go through a typical Canadian education system, so I started high school English courses near my community. Then, I entered this university and have attended various subjects that interest me: English literature, Sociology, Philosophy, and Business etc. I really enjoy studying here.

I don’t know how my intellectual path will unwind in the future, but I am pretty sure that I will be still curious about the world and continuously learning new things around me.