Although I participated in stage plays and musicals (as well as playing guitar and singing in bands) throughout high school and college, I was determined to take a more stable career route and decided to head to Chiba, Japan after graduation. I worked for the Japanese Ministry of Education as a junior high school English teacher. While my title was AES (Assistant English Teacher), I was most certainly flexing my acting muscles daily as I tried to employ as much creativity and role-playing as I could into my lesson plans to make learning more enjoyable for my students.