#girlswithgoals: Rachel Bovee
9:00 AM
RACHEL BOVEE
yay, girls are awesome!!! This next girl with adventurous goals is none other than my cousin, Rachel! I can go on and on about her. She graduated from UCSD, which kind of pushed me to see what college was all about. She pursued her degree and moved allllll the way to Korea to teach English to high schoolers and now at COLLEGE!! She is a creative writer who writes with such imagination, she is also another reason why I love to blog I wish I was as a creative writer like her; PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. She has accomplished so much and still has so much more to go! She is the epitome of strength, and kindness. I love everything about her and just take a look at her interview:
1. Tell us a little about yourself!
Hmm.. a little about myself? Well, I'm originally from San Francisco but am currently living in Seoul, South Korea. I am working as an English professor, diligently trying to incorporate more travel and adventure into my life constantly, and working on and off at my main life dream of being a published writer.
2. What did you major in and where?
In undergraduate studies, I majored in English Writing & Literature at University of California San Diego (UCSD) and my graduate studies were at California College of the Arts (CCA), getting a MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in fiction.
3. I know that you're currently in Korea, what made you want to work there?
After finishing my master's degree, I felt like I was at a unique point in my life. I wasn't married and didn't have any career yet to keep my in the states so it was a really great time to live abroad. Living abroad was something that I had wanted to do for such a long time but didn't have the guts to do until that time. On top of that, I knew that in addition to being a writer, I had a real heart for teaching. So I thought that teaching high school English abroad would be a great way to a) gain experience, b) challenge myself, and c) help pave the way to what I eventually wanted which was professordom. I was educated, energized, ready for a new challenge, and really wanting to start what I felt would be one of the first real main chapters of my adult life. Why Korea specifically? I had some interest in Korean culture and my Pacific Asian family background and upbringing made me feel like I would be able to really adjust more while probably figuring out a lot more of who I am as an individual in Asia.
4. What were some challenges being in a whole new world?
Oh geez, what wasn't a challenge?? Haha. No but seriously, there were a lot of difficulties when I first came to Korea. When I first moved to Korea, I moved to a rural area that didn't have the conveniences and rampant use of English that Seoul has. At that time, I couldn't speak a word of Korean and I was awkward, missing my family, flustered, lonely, and had arrived in Korea fresh off of an emergency surgery only the week prior. Ordering food at places without pictures, figuring out directions in a country where Google maps isn't allowed access to accurate coordinates, adjusting to being stared at so much in a country that is known as being the most homogenous country in the world.... there were so many difficulties at first. But, as I learned, they were also a lot of brand new opportunities to learn, conquer, and push myself in ways that I didn't know I would be able to, not only withstand, but succeed in.
5. What were some goals you accomplished in your 4 years being in Korea?
I feel like part of what makes my life interesting, hectic, and ever adventurous for me is that I am never satisfied. This can come across as seemingly negative but that isn't what I mean. I am so humbled and grateful for the strength to have climbed so many steps and to find new opportunities and new doors opening constantly but I rarely think about what I've accomplished because I am more often considering the list of things I have yet to do (or, in more truth, adding to that evergrowing list!). If I take step back, I'd say in the past four years that I have been in Korea, there have been a few accomplishments, both personally and professionally. Professionally: I worked hard at several high schools with students from many different backgrounds and honed skills that allowed me the opportunity to finally move into being a full-time faculty professor at an accomplished and respected university in Seoul. I've worked on different collaborations with other teachers or other writers on several projects in the past few years. I've joined writing groups that help encourage and critique my writing in order to help make publishing more possible. In hopes of research journal publication, I've started the small beginnings of a research project about the use of creative arts in the academic settlings of learning language. Personally: I've added a bunch more stamps to my passport. I've learned a new language with quite conversational proficiency. I've been taught how to be far more relaxed and how to decipher what needs to be attempted and what is useless to try in terms of controlling life's many varying journeys. I've met so many amazing and terrible and brilliant and hilarious and disgusting and life-changing people from all over the world. I learned to allow myself to love. I feel like the list, in terms of personally, could go on endlessly.
6. Being that you accomplished so much already, do you have any future goals in mind?
Like I said before, I am an overflowing cup in terms of future goals. Far too many to ever accomplish but it will be quite a ride trying. If I were to force myself to name just a few of the big ones, I'd say: publishing at least one novel, having a novel that makes it onto one of the big international bestseller or awards lists, traveling to every continent, living in at least one more country, learning at least four languages (hopefully more like seven or eight) conversationally fluently, eventually being able to be a creative writing professor working in both an undergraduate and graduate program, opening up a thriving and active center specifically for children in domestic violence situations,..... andddd having a huge ranch full of rescue dogs who needed homes!
7. What is a quote that you live by?
Because I think it is both speaking to all the different forms of relationships we have with one another and the relationships we have with ourselves, I have long been captured by this one quote of Rilke's from Letters to a Young Poet: “It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”
Thank you for taking the time to interview, and thank you to those who have read it!! #girlswithgoals have so much to offer!!
Best,
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