Sam Smith

Why did it take you seven years to complete college?

After my second year of college I took a break to go teach English in China. Normally, someone would need a bachelor’s degree already to get a job like this, but since I had experience teaching music to high-schoolers and helping exchange students with their English essays in college, I got lucky!

This was the most thrilling, challenging, and amazing experience of my life. Not only was my Chinese rudimentary when I first arrived, I had no time for training when I first arrived. I jumped in head-first as an ESL teacher, and a year later, I received a promotion to Assistant Manager of Foreign Staff before my time in China was cut short by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

During the pandemic I met my now-husband and his four-year-old daughter. I fell in love with them both and now can call them my own. I started going back to university at UAB in the Summer of 2021. It wasn’t easy being a full-time student and a new parent (and at the time my physical health was rather poor), but I made it work! If you’d like to hear more about the hardships that I went through on my journey to finish my degree, read my award-winning essay on the topic here.