#epik fall

Regular Fall Intake - Late August -  Don’t do it. If you can wait until winter intake, then you would be doing yourself a favor. Late Fall Intake - Late September - HAH. The worst time to start. Regular Winter Intake - Late February - The BEST time to start. Winter Late Intake - Late March - Ideally, you want to attend orientation and then teach, but that’s why this is a little awkward. You’ll have just missed the winter orientation, so you’ll be attending a slightly shorter make-up orientation after you start teaching and living in Korea. But at least you’re still starting near the beginning of the academic year! I’ll take any intake in winter over fall.

Imagine this: It’s February. You arrive in Seoul a day before orientation. You are exhausted from the flight, but excited to make some new friends and explore Seoul. After you check into an interesting hostel near the airport, as planned, you meet up with a couple other new EPIK teachers from the facebook group. Everyone is a bit awkward, but really friendly. There’s a 30-year-old adventurous backpacker dude with nothing but stories about the 29 countries he’s traveled. There’s the corky young lady with big hair and an all-trends-breaker kind of fashion. And then there’s everyone else. Mostly inexperienced travelers, straight out of college, couldn’t figure out what to do with your degree, but some combination of kpop, kdramas, and the idea of dating a Korean brought you here! You all happily take a cab together, since some people offer to split the fare. Then you find yourself exchanging details about your education, recent break-up, and lack of income over really good Korean barbecue. Who knew you would have so much in common with the person sitting across from you!

Later that night, you’d head back to your hostel and realize a couple of you are at the same hostel! Wow, amazing. You’re really good friends now, so the three of you decide to head to the orientation pick up spot altogether the next day. The EPIK orientation leads were so friendly and you had so much fun getting to know everyone and learning about Korea. You passed the medical exam, learned survival Korean phrases that you already knew, and presented your first terrible English lesson plan after taking the shortest crash course on lesson planning.

After all that hard work at orientation, you finally enjoy 3 hours of free time, before it’s goodbye, pack your bags, and head to your provinces. Fast forward to post-orientation, you finally arrive at your new home, you meet your co-teacher and she’s speaks just enough English, so she can do everything for you (set up bank account, set up school lunch auto-fee, set up internet, help you get a phone, etc.) She gives you a tour of the school and shows you to your classroom. Your school has an assembly to welcome all the faculty back and introduce the new teachers, including you!

It’s the beginning of the new school year, the students are excited to meet you and you are so ready! This is February intake.

Okay, so this sequence is a bit optimistic, so let’s just say I left out the traumatic stuff (like getting lost), but overall, this is what’s possible with a February intake. This is NOT my experience. This is the OPPOSITE of my experience. BUT this is what almost everyone from February intake told me they experienced. If I could do it all over again, I would. I’d go in February. So, yeah, you’re welcome.

Wanna hear what my experience was like? Wanna know what Fall Late Intake is like? No. You don’t. But in case you do, read below.

Since Korea’s academic year begins early March, this will allow you to establish yourself as the English teacher for the year.  Have you ever had a substitute teacher come into your class half way through the year and say “I’ll be your teacher the rest of the year.” YEAH, it’s not pretty. That’s a hard job. Coming in during Fall makes you.... a LONG TERM SUBSTITUTE. No one took me seriously. You know why? NOT even my co-teacher took me seriously. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Because that means the foreigner before me... QUIT. So to them, we’re a bunch of quitters. If that one ran out in the middle of the school year, guess what they think I’ll do?

Imagine this: It’s late September. You arrive in Seoul. Customs asks me why I’m here. I tell them, I’m here as an EPIK English teacher. They think I’m lying. They escort me out of line and sit me in a room. They ask me again, what I’m doing in Korea. I tell them the same thing. They ask me a series of questions, “What is your full name? How long will you be staying in Korea? Have you been to Korea before?” all in Korean, so I could only answer the first 3 questions. After that, I didn’t know how to answer the rest of them, so this delayed me for another 10 minutes. FAIL#1. They finally let me go. I ask the officer escorting me to the bypass, how to get to Gimpo Airport because my flight is in 40 minutes. He reads my itinerary and laughs, because he thinks I won’t make it. He gestures  down the escalators and I sprint down them to find the baggage carousels are empty! I ran around and luckily found the guy that was about to haul my baggage to the unclaimed storage room. SUCCESS#1. I have 30 minutes. I can’t find the subway. FAIL#2. I exchange some USD into KRW so I can pay for a bus fare to Gimpo. I find the right bus line to Gimpo with the help of an English-speaking flight attendant! SUCCESS#2. We board the bus and I have 20 minutes until my flight. She tells me the bus ride to Gimpo takes 40 minutes. FAIL#3. I arrive at Gimpo and since my previous flight was delayed, they allowed me to take the next flight out. Ticket changed! SUCCESS#3. Gimpo Airport is 2 floors. You have to manually transfer your baggage when traveling from Incheon to Gimpo. I fell down the escalator trying to stop my 2 check-in suitcases from rolling down. FAIL#4. I make it to Jeju Airport and luckily my director and handler are still there! SUCCESS#4. They take me to immigrations to apply for an ARC (ID card). Immigration says it takes 24 hours after I arrive in the country for my information to appear in their database. I must come back the next day. FAIL#5. My handler tells me that without an ARC, I cannot apply for cell service, internet, or a bank card. It takes an additional 3-5 weeks to receive the ARC in the mail. FAIL#6. They take me to my studio apartment (INSTEAD OF ORIENTATION--that’s right there is no orientation until October 20th). FAIL#7. Studio apartment is infested with bugs and mold. Seems like the unit was abandoned years ago and no one ever cleaned it. FAIL#8. Had to go straight to school after dropping my baggage in the studio, where we would learn that the head teacher would hate everything about me. She hated that I was young. She hated that I didn’t speak Korean. She hated that I had never been to Korea. FAIL#9. My co-teacher wasn’t there. FAIL#10. Head teacher handed me a class schedule that I couldn’t comprehend. FAIL#11. During lunch time, I couldn’t eat at the school cafeteria because my lunch automated fee wasn’t set up yet. I would need an ARC for them to set that up. FAIL#12. Head teacher asked me to lesson plan from the textbook without giving me any chapter, direction, or assistance. FAIL#13. When I stopped by her classroom for help, she said she would come and get me when she has time. She never did. At 5pm, I walked out of my classroom and found all the lights were already switched off. I was locked inside the school BY MYSELF. FAIL#14. I tripped the surround sound alarms trying to open the front doors of the school. FAIL#15. I panicked and jumped out of a window from the second floor, hurting my ankle. FAIL#16. Kids on the field witnessed this and were in shock. Hello, nice to meet all of you. I am your new English teacher. FAIL#17. Apparently, the wall I cascaded down was freshly painted in white. My jeans were black. FAIL#18. I made it just in time and caught the bus before it left! Unfortunately, it wasn’t the bus home. FAIL#19. I contacted my handler and the director about directions to my studio apartment. They texted me two different routes with 2 different bus stops. FAIL#20. They were both wrong. FAIL#21. I ended up at the bus terminal around 10pm, as the director advised me to do after waiting around various bus stops without any luck. I caught the last bus to JFLHS. SUCCESS#5. The bedding was damp. I slept on the floor with the bugs. FAIL#22. I woke up the next day with a huge swollen foot from multiple mosquito bites. FAIL#23. I could not get my BIG ass foot to fit into my shoes. FAIL#24. It was humid, pouring rain, and my foot became infected from walking barefoot. FAIL#25. The director called me a cab to take me into the city to see a skin doctor. He told me insurance wouldn’t cover the visit because I don’t have any without an ARC. FAIL#26. I paid out of pocket. But it was only 30,000 KRW (30 USD)! SUCCESS#6. Co-teacher asked me to come into school even with my swollen foot. I went school.