During this time, I was also blessed to see for the first time

how a language is taught in a classroom setting,

when I started taking Japanese at Western Washington University.

Through watching my professor teach my fellow students and I,

I realized that teaching language is what I want to do with my life,

and it’s been my dream ever since.

I finish the Japanese 203 at WWU by the time I left for this abroad trip. I am majoring in Japanese with a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages minor at Western Washington University. I am also planning on getting a Masters in Teaching. I am also majoring in Linguistics, but that was something I decided after I applied for any scholarships or KCP.

 I'm Simone Hansen,

I decided my name is pronounced as シモエン in Japanese because my name can't be pronounced accurately anyway in the language.

I was 19 years old when I applied to my scholarships and to my study abroad program. I like to read, sculpt, sew, draw, paint, photograph, play video games, watch anime, and study Japanese. Of my artistic hobbies but I'm only good at 2 of them. The two I am good at are sculpting and photography (as shown with all of my photographs you can find covering this site).

As of the winter quarter of 2018 my GPA is 3.61, but I applied for KCP during the summer, so my GPA was slightly higher, like at 3.70.  I was also a  19 and a Sophomore during the time of applying.


Statistics of me

A Quick Summary of my life

I grew up on a small island in San Juan County. During my elementary school years, I left normal class along with some other kids to get some extra instruction, involving things like spelling, speech, and especially reading. As I got older, my academic skills increased and I no longer needed to go to the extra lessons.

I started learning Japanese in high school online. In my Senior year of high school, I was accepted to go to Japan with seven other students from my school and another nearby school for two weeks.

 I am majoring in Japanese with a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages minor at Western Washington University. I am also planning on getting a Masters in Teaching. I am also majoring in Linguistics, but that was something I decided after I applied to any scholarships or KCP. I will have finish Japanese 203 at WWU by the time I leave to go on this abroad trip.

When I started college, in 2016, for the first few days

I did not talk to anyone outside of class, but

I decided I really wanted to play games in Japanese.

The school did not have any Japanese clubs

except for the Japanese Association Club—

which was more about culture.


I began to research how clubs were made, and

emailed every single student in my Japanese Class, 

and asked my Japanese teacher to share my club idea

with her other classes, so I could gather enough

members to make the club.

 Lacking friends, I only got a few students

that said they were willing to be officers of the

club and we needed five to make it official.

It took me the whole first quarter to get the club

officially running, and once it was, more people joined it. Today the club has 23 members