Saint Patrick’s Day in Vietnam interview

Notes from the future: Because its Saint Patrick’s Day next week and because it has been almost a year since my last post, I thought I would share my Premier TEFL interview experience. It is daunting returning to this blog because I am now teaching between 30 and 35 contact hours a week in Dublin. It leaves little room to post about my stories in my book and memories of the past. However, inspiration comes from the small things. Cian and his partner Uisce really enjoyed reading these stories, and told me this days before their journey to teach in Korea.

The other point is that this story is set before my planned trip to Saigon and before Saint Patrick’s Day, which makes it a bit tricky to pin down canonically. Maybe I have a few more things to brush off before posting more about Saigon.

So this post is dedicated to Cian and Uisce. Thank you both for keeping me motivated to post on here. It means a lot, and I wish you both the best for your time in Ulsan/울산광역시

On with the show…

March 2018

It was a return trip back from Co Nhue with Niamh, Chris and Mia, around 5PM and around the end of the CT20 ringroad. The Convention Center’s wavy rooftop appeared in the distance, as Niamh found out something via an e-mail. It was from Premier TEFL, the organizers of mine, Niamh and Chris’s internship to Vietnam. Most others in Hanoi used i-to-i or the TEFL Academy, but we had used Premier TEFL for our certs. They had e-mailed us requesting to contribute to an interview over the internship. But a special one waited for me a few weeks later on a Sunday evening.

I read that they wanted to interview me for Saint Patrick’s Day. Being one of the Irish teachers they had in a far flung place certainly helped my case with getting published on their blog. It was a bit of fun, and with a few photos already collected by this point of the internship, I wrote it all up and replied.

Sure enough, it appeared near the day, and it looked great. Less well looking was the edited video with my words overlaid over still pictures. I think it would have been better to have used a video interview for that. The main issue I would have had with the interview was that it wanted 100% positivity. That’s understandable as the company did want to have more internship programs, but I did feel it was a bit lacking in honesty considering BME was not being great to a few teachers around this time. Interns like us also tended to know by that point that we were getting paid less than we should, and the schools we were sent to were not as great as the full timers. A real trial by fire scenario despite having a lot of fun elsewhere.

Even so, it was just one of the many small things that I enjoyed doing while I was in Cau Giay. It was enjoyable to share a story like this to friends and family while I was there, and exciting to see it published on the site I was studying on months earlier.

The interview with Premier TEFL can be found here.
https://premiertefl.com/gb/blog/luck-irish-vietnam-meet-paul-cunningham/

Niamh’s interview can be found here.
https://premiertefl.com/blog/niamh-careys-vietnam/