A thousand years ago I lived in South Korea. At the time I was a junior analyst working in the international department of what was then the country’s second largest investment bank, Lucky Goldstar Securities (later LG Investment Securities). At the time, foreign investors had been pushing the country to open its theretofore closed financial market. And while the Koreans wouldn’t let themselves be pushed around, they nonetheless understood that a market opening was inevitable. Consequently, they began pouring resources into developing an English language research product that, at the very least, was comparable to the sort of research being produced by their foreign counterparts in New York, London and Hong Kong. I was one of those resources.
It was not a part of my job description, but it was perhaps inevitable that whatever any of my Korean colleagues wrote in English would be passed along to me to edit for comprehensibility, as well as for errors in grammar, punctuation and so on. I was, in other words, a virtual copy-editor and proofreader. Years later I worked as a senior financial analyst and portfolio manager in a boutique asset management company in New York city. I produced all of our research and marketing material, and was, once again the in-house editor and proofreader. After the Asian currency collapse in 1997, and the decimation of equity markets across east Asia, I returned to South Korea. This time as an investment banker overseeing a team of four young, Korean analysts. And there too, it fell upon me to make sure the research product was up to snuff.
Obviously, I didn’t stay in the world of international finance. If I had, you wouldn’t be reading this. Instead, I wound up in a monastery at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere on Canada’s achingly beautiful Cape Breton Island where I dwelt for ten years. But that’s another story, isn’t it?
When I left the monastery, through a series of unlikely coincidences I ended up enrolling in a writing class at Dalhousie University in order to rekindle my ancient affair with poetry. Perhaps not coincidentally, I won the Clare Murray Fooshie poetry prize in 2011. Two years later I was a teaching assistant in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There I helped teach an academic writing class, mostly to Chinese and Middle Eastern students. Along the way I met a lovely German woman who was a professor at the university, and she, if you must know, is why I came to Germany in the first place.
And now that I am here, I continue to work in Academia. I am currently a lecturer at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg) in Lörrach. I am still teaching academic writing (in addition to other courses in the International Business department) and, I am still editing and proofreading other people’s work. Along the way, I earned accreditation as an English language instructor from the TEFL Academy, and am in the process of completing copy editing certification from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario.
