I graduated from Chantilly Highschool in 2013 and went to Northern Virginia Community College from 2013 to 2016. Originally I was going to get an associates degree in fine arts, but things changed when I had a medical issue that meant I couldn’t use a camera the same anymore. I dropped out of NOVA to heal and put down my camera.
In the Mean time, I found myself a girlfriend, now my wife, at an anime convention the same year I dropped out of school. She helped me a lot, especially with organizing my talents into things I like, things I can do, and things that help people. Over the course of 4 years that I wasn’t in college I was working on my mental health, and looking for what I wanted to do career wise.
I fell into voice acting in 2018 when I tried to set up a YouTube channel reading short stories by internet authors. I really enjoyed everything about it, the process, the product, and the content. So I dove deep into learning how to become a voice actress.
The summer of 2019, I was a little bored and wanted something challenging to do that wasn’t work related. I was rewatching K-on and realized that I didn’t really need to read the subtitles to understand what was going on, and I had always wanted to learn Japanese! A few YouTube searches and a trip to the book store later I began to self study Japanese.
Japanese as a language and Japan as a place and culture have been on my radar since about 5th or 6th grade when a friend of mine showed me the anime “Naruto”. I was enthralled! I was really disappointed when my high school didn’t offer Japanese as a language, and really wanted to enjoy Japanese media without translations getting in the way. It helps that now there are a lot of great youtubers explaining Japanese as a language, and it’s culture and daily life.
While I dove into voice acting and Japanese, I had to learn how to make my own website and logo. I also really enjoyed this work. It gave me a more traditional art outlet that I seemed to have a knack for. That brought me to ODU in 2020.
I started as a graphic design major but failed all of my classes major that fall. I didn’t, however, fail my Japanese class. In fact, I did better than I ever had in any class before, even considering grade school.
As of 2022 I’m waiting to enter the Japanese Major, hopefully it will be available sooner rather than later. I would love to study in Japan for a year. Part of that is because I’d love the chance to immerse in the language, but a lot of it is because I want to live there in the future. Studying abroad will be a dream come true!
Now that I have an established career with Voice acting, a knack for graphic design, and a Love for Japan and the language, I want to combine all of those skills in my future career. It would be really cool to open an agency in Japan to help get English voice actors connected to Japanese companies who might need native English voices, and an agency where I have a team of in-house graphic designers to help those voice actors with their branding.
As of Fall 2022, I feel like I’m in a middle period where Japanese is still uncomfortable to use, but I don’t feel as lost as when I first started. I can hold a conversation or write a journal if I’m well prepared. However, the moment I’m put on the spot, or I’m overly tired or stressed all of what I learned leaves my brain. I need to solidify what I know I know so that it’s second nature to use. I think a way to help with this is to get a Japanese Monolingual dictionary so I stop translating everything from English. This semester I’m going to do a VLT exchange every week, because speaking is my weakest point. I am going to start a YouTube channel so that I have a log of my Japanese language journey.