This was like a dream turned nightmare.

Uh huh.

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel.

Loveless kelly your virtual ticket to Japan Today I'm going to be talking about the jet program because I think it's actually coming up soon.

Like you guys can literally like apply for it now.

The jet program is a Japan exchange teaching program.

So if you guys are interested in teaching in Japan jet program is probably the one thing that you want to look at first among all the other programs because the jet program and honestly it pays the most um, it gets you to Japan for free.

You learn a lot during your time there.

I'm going to tell you a story about my experience in the jet program because it wasn't pretty, if you guys don't know me.

My name is Liz kelly and I live in Japan have lived here for five years and this channel is all about life, health and travel, honestly can't escape Japan videos because this is my life, this is my life.

I started out in the jet program and that's why I'm here today to help you guys apply for it and be the best that you can be if you want to move to Japan very, very hard to move to Japan when you don't want to teach.

I suggest teaching for at least a year moving to Japan and then if you want to search for something else, there are possibilities and ways to do that.

But we're not going to discuss that.

Today, we're going to talk about teaching.

Not saying that the jet program is a bad program.

The jet program is actually like one of the best program.

Um, some situations are worse than others.

You can't really choose where you live, all sorts of things.

So this is like the first video in my moving to Japan series.

If you're interested.

I'm currently working on a guidebook on how to move to Japan and what you need documents.

You need, um, reasons why you want to move here.

Um, what to prepare, what to bring, all sorts of things.

I'm working on that guide book right now and it's going to be kind of like a video course bef to prep you to move to Japan because I wish I had that before I moved to Japan.

If you guys want to know anything and you want me to put like a detailed description of something in this guidebook, please comment down below.

I would love to know your questions so I can put those in the guide book that's going to be coming out soon on my website.

Loveless kelly dot com.

When I was in college I was studying japanese and education.

I wanted to be a japanese teacher in the states, but jobs were very scarce once I graduated.

So I decided I wanted to move to Japan to teach as an english teacher, when you apply for the jet program, you do not have to be a teacher.

You just have to have, you don't have to have experience as a teacher, you just have to have a bachelor's degree.

Most HLT jobs L.

T.

As in assistant language teacher.

So those types of teachers are basically like language recorders.

So most of the jobs in the jet program are just LT positions.

Some schools will, that will allow you to teach like a full class and things like that just depends on your situation.

Nobody has the same experience, that's all I'm going to say.

So going into this you have to be open minded and you have to prepare for the worst.

I applied for the jet program my last right before I graduated I was very hopeful.

I've been wanting to do this for so long.

I've heard of so many stories.

When I studied abroad in high school, I met a couple of LTs that did the jet program and that's how I learned about it and then I always aspired to do this program like all my life.

And so I was really excited to apply for.

It didn't apply for just one program, I applied for jet program.

I applied for interact which is another company that's similar to the jet program, all sorts of programs that you can apply for.

So I applied for all of them just in case I didn't get the jet program, applied for the jet program filled up the long ass application essay.

I turned everything in.

I was ready to go.

I was excited to hear back and then eventually I got the interview and I was really, really excited.

I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I made it to the interview interview was not as intense as the actual application.

Like you would think that it would be more intense.

But when I entered the room, the people that were there were pretty kind and nice and considerate.

Some of my interview is in japanese because if you put that you're, you speak japanese, they'll ask you questions in japanese, you don't need to learn japanese.

They just want to test that you're true to what you say and went through the interview, I was pretty confident and then I eventually got the job and I was really excited.

The worst part was getting all the documents he needed to move to Japan, especially the fingerprints, the fingerprints.

I almost wasn't going to be able to go to Japan because of those damn fingerprints.

The police weren't doing them correctly.

So I would turn in my fingerprints and they weren't, they weren't going through like it just wasn't calculating, I searched everywhere for different police departments and things like that that would take me and do my fingerprints.

It was the worst thing in the world.

Eventually it went through, I was okay to go but it was just madness, background checks, all sorts of health checks, shots, things like that.

You need all this stuff in order to move to Japan.

That was probably the most stressful part.

The most tedious part was application interview part was the easiest and the gathering the documents part was the most stressful.

I moved to Al Maury Prefecture and Al Maury Prefecture is very isolating.

So let's back up a little bit when I got my placement, I was like, that sucks.

I heard very good things about Al Maury like there's beautiful festivals, beautiful things.

It was a new experience for me because I've always spent my time in the Kansai region.

It was in the very south of Japan.

So going to the very north of Japan but it was also very scary because of the earthquake had just happened like a year ago and then they emailed me and they said we don't really have a position for you.

I was really confused.

My position was to work in A B.

O.

E, which is a board of education office in Al Maury.

So I was like, oh that's cool.

Like I get to work in an office.

Usually when you join the debt program you have a predecessor.

Is that how you say it?

I don't even know you have somebody that's the person that you're going to take the place of is the person that's kind of your mentor before you moved to Japan.

She told me that she didn't teach very much, she would go to maybe one school like a month and I was like, oh my God, I picked the one girl that has an education background that studied education and they didn't have a school for her.

I didn't have a placement at a school, like a specific school.

She went to like seven different schools and she would only go to these schools like every couple few months so she wouldn't be able to connect with the students, she wouldn't be able to connect with the teachers, I wouldn't be able to do those things.

So I was panicking and I was like, okay, so what did they over recruit and then they didn't know where to put me because my goal was to teach in Japan, like I wanted a school, I wanted to teach, this is my dream.

And the fact that I didn't really get that opportunity was very disappointing there.

Like if we'd understand if you didn't want to do the jet program, blah blah blah blah blah and that was disheartening.

So I said yes and I said, you know, I'm going to be positive about this, I'm going to be open minded, I'm going to go into this, have new experiences, meet new people.

Um, so I was really hyping myself up, I was pumping myself up for this experience to happen, like this is my dream and I'm going to be fine, everything's gonna be okay, It was very positive about it.

Then when I got there, when I got to al Maury, I was given an apartment that was literally 9000 yen a month, which is $90 a month.

It was a very cheap apartment.

The walls were not finished.

Like if you touch the walls things would come off of them.

It was really old.

Elmore is very, very cold.

I had a bathtub that if the winter got cold enough it would freeze and I would have to take a pot of water and dump it on top of the bathtub to get it to work and fire it up.

Like it was really intense living in Al Maury at the time.

There were no trains going from Alan moore to Tokyo place.

I lived in Hirosaki which is probably one of the best places to be in Al Maury.

I think it's a very small city but it's very beautiful.

The castle was probably one of my favorite castle grounds.

I really liked going for walks and riding my bike around there.

So it was really nice.

It's a very beautiful area but like I said, it was very isolating and I feel like it's good for like if you're retired or something when I got there um, I wanted to reach out to the Jets, the other Jet teachers.

Jet program was very, very cliquey.

There weren't a lot of very nice people from where I was living.

I was not, I was kind of like considered an outsider.

I wanted to study a lot.

So I would stay at home.

I wouldn't go to the clubs.

I wouldn't go to the bars all the time.

I would sometimes, but it was very, very rare because I wanted to study, I wanted to do my own thing.

I wanted to study japanese, so I would stay at home a lot and study.

A lot of the Jets would talk behind my back and be like, okay, she doesn't hang out with anybody.

She wants to study japanese and she wants to start a Youtube channel and stuff like that.

I was just told that I was like too much of an introvert.

So I, I was never invited to things and like all that stuff and yeah, to be honest, like I was kind of like an introvert introvert, but I kind of wanted to work on my own, my blog.

I had a blog at the time.

I wanted to do my own stuff and people weren't really appreciating it.

So if I didn't go to the club or something, they'd be like, oh well of course she's not going to go to the club because she doesn't want to hang out with anybody and that wasn't really the case.

My neighbors were absolutely awful to me and like that killed my experience a little bit.

I'm probably not going to go into too much detail, but they weren't very nice at all and I kind of expected that because they talked a lot about other people behind their backs.

When I first met them, they were always saying so much crap about other jets in the program.

Even people that they would hang out with regularly, they would talk about in a nasty way.

My neighbors, like honestly they didn't like japan, they talked about japanese people like they were a piece of crap and like they complained about everything and it's just like if you, if you don't genuinely like Japan don't move here.

So there's a lot of negativity going on, there's a lot of clique iness, there was a lot of immaturity and like that kind of killed the experience for me.

I did have a lot of close friends in Al Maury, like I hung out with people, I met some japanese friends and we would hang out.

So I did have my own group of friends that I loved hanging out with and genuinely loved talking to you.

So it wasn't like I was friendless completely um going to a Japanese office every single day.

Like I said, I worked in a bot and I was given like zero tasks.

I asked them like what should I do?

They're like, oh, we'll create lesson plans and create lesson plans for what and they're like, oh well just think of some ideas just in case you go to a school next week or something and it's just like you can't make a lesson plan without knowing what they're teaching or what they're learning.

I asked if I could study japanese and they said no, it sucked to learn japanese, especially in Al Maury because they speak in such a different dialect.

It's not the dialect that we learned like learning a whole new language and I'm worried not even Japanese people from Tokyo or kyoto, they don't even understand this region's dialect.

It's called Sukha Rubin and it was, it was intense, it was a very different sounding language.

So the studying thing I couldn't do, which was stupid.

They used Internet explorer most of the time who uses internet explorer.

I was literally going insane sitting at a desk eight hours a day, not going to classes, not learning, not teaching.

I had no experiences.

It was really, really depressing.

And I was getting to that point where I would just like go home and cry because I had no, no work I had, it sounds great in hindsight.

Like it's just like, wow, you have a job but you're not actually working, you're getting paid.

That's awesome.

It's great that you get paid to do absolutely nothing, but it can drive you freaking mad if you have nothing to do.

I prefer to stay busy.

I prefer to do a job and get paid when you have a dream and you want to go to Japan and you want to teach.

Like specifically.

Like they put the girl that studied education in zero schools.

What a waste is like such a waste of my time.

My future is more important.

They're not giving me the job that I was told that I was going to be doing that.

I was hired to do.

Honestly when you don't get what your contract says, then that is a huge reason for you to quit.

So I decided to quit, check your contract because it does say that you can quit 30 days in advance.

Most contracts say that there's some contracts that say you have to pay your plane ticket back, luckily my contract didn't say that.

It was just like you have to give a 30 day notice.

Other thing that they told me before before I decided to quit, they told me R.

B.

O.

E.

Is getting rid of LTs, we don't want an A.

L.

T anymore.

We don't want to pay you anymore.