ABSTRACT
Throughout graduate school my research interests opened up opportunities for me to study in the Netherlands and Turkey to study how education and language policy development and implementation processes impact the broader contexts in which they are embedded. Although my postgraduate plan was to get work experience in the US, I realized that I would eventually have to head back overseas to do fieldwork and establish the groundwork for a new research agenda (that next research agenda no one told me about in graduate school). However, in February 2011, I happened upon a job call from a small, private, English-medium university in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The call was for an assistant professor position in English Language Teaching (ELT) that also involved teaching in a Master of Arts program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). What caught my attention was that, in addition to the standard requirements related to ELT and TESOL positions, the hiring committee was looking for people whose research interests extended to, or included, education, language policy and planning processes, and a slew of other topics, which are areas not typically seen in such job calls. I applied, was interviewed, and eventually accepted their offer of employment.
