How Cultural Heritage Days Influenced Bailey’s Career Path
“My interest in Japanese culture started with different types of cultures that I grew up with. My cousin is Asian American, having been adopted from China, and my mother told me stories about different experiences she’d had with very interesting people from East Asia,” said Bailey Schnittker, 21 years old, a transfer student at UC Davis.
Before transferring to UC Davis, she spent about three years at the local community college, DVC, pursuing a major in Japanese and minor in art history. Growing up being interested in Japanese culture and art helped influence her interests in picking her major and minor. It also helped that she had people around her who acted as inspiration to pursue these topics.
Bailey said “friends and family members became a large part in influencing what [she] knew because they had introduced [her] to things like traditional Asian style cooking, street markets, and Chinese New Year events when [she] was still very young.”
Another influence she had was through cultural heritage days at school, which celebrate multiple kinds of ethnic backgrounds. These events are a main reason she was encouraged to “branch out and discover new things, one of those countries being Japan,” said Bailey. She was eager to experience new things as “it felt more personal” when she could experience it for herself.
These genuine ways to connect with people and earn knowledge at the same time were part of what helped her decide on her major and minor.
Picking Japanese as a major was heavily influenced by her high school Japanese teacher Andrew Schreiber.
Bailey said, “Schreiber was a model example of a teacher to [her]. He understood the balance between working and being open and caring towards his students. At times, he had to be strict and serious, which made the class feel grounded.”
Schreiber’s passion for teaching the subject encouraged students to “have compassion for the subject.” Bailey said how Schreiber showed his students that he could “learn from us as much as we could him” and how “it made him feel more like a close friend at times.” She could really see the potential of what studying Japanese could do for future careers.
“Though I feel I would have continued studying even without his guidance, I would’ve questioned whether or not I wanted it to be my major more if it weren’t for him,” said Bailey.
On another hand, she said her minor was picked completely by chance due to a mistake.
When she was getting ready to transfer from DVC to UC Davis, she found out last minute that they changed the policy for credits in Japanese classes. More than half of the classes she took no longer would transfer credits over to UC Davis, so she had to stay at DVC for one more semester to get the credits she needed.
Since she had already finished everything needed for her major and general education at DVC, she decided to take classes that were interesting while also giving her credits to transfer to UC Davis; one of which was art history. She took the class knowing museums and art are part of her interests and saw the class as a good fit. After that, she has kept taking art history classes and cemented it as her minor.
Bailey said she’s got three types of art periods that interest her the most. She said “two are very broad with them being the baroque art period, the Greek period with focus on the Hellenistic period, and the third being Futurism….” Futurism was a very chaotic look on interpretations of art and literature in the early 20th century.
With her major and minor set, she plans to go into teaching with a side job as a Japanese translator.
Bailey said her current plans in teaching are up for the future to decide, however, she plans to get her teaching credential after completing her degree in Japanese. As of right now, her heart is set on teaching elementary school students, but she’s conflicted as she enjoys working with multiple age groups from her experience as a tutor. During her credential training she hopes to see which age group she enjoys working with the most.
She has her heart set on elementary school students, because it’s a period in a child’s life where they are “very innocently curious about everything” and are still trying to figure things out. Plus that’s around the same age she realized she enjoyed learning about different cultures. “It’d be a great way to positively introduce different types of cultures they didn’t know about before, including Japanese,” said Bailey. She doesn’t expect her students to learn the language, but she wants them to be able to experience the culture and hopefully find things they like about it.
“Some of my best memories from elementary school involve learning new things. If a student is able to identify with aspects of a culture they hadn’t known about prior to my class, it’d be a great success. I get the best of both if my future students decide that is something they want to study too,” said Bailey. “I hope it will be equally as enjoyable for my future students as it will be for me to teach.”
