Writing With Abandon

This morning I read Maite’s slice about the goodbye at the end of her 3-week trip to Australia, loving the lines at the end where she reflects on how travel is often less about places than it is about people and the connections you make.

Two days ago, I saw a post on Instagram about how people change their lives more often after travel than therapy — travel shakes you out of autopilot, shows you other possibilities for life, temporarily removes social roles, adds controlled uncertainty, and allows learning through movement and emotion (Daniel Chidiac).

Both of these posts got me thinking more about travel and specifically my new job, which is in the travel industry. So, I figured today was as good a time as ever to slice about what the heck it is that I do now that I’m not a teacher!

Since the end of July, I’ve been working as the client engagement manager at Insight Global Education. Say what now?

Let me start with who I work for: Insight is a small Canadian-American company that designs hands-on, experiential travel programs for students. Learning and local expertise is at the heart of what we do — these aren’t your typical group tours. In fact, our programs aren’t “tours” at all. Every single travel program is unique and customized for the schools that travel with us. 5 days, 7 days, 12 days, these aren’t “volunteer tourism” programs either. Our philosophy is that people shouldn’t travel somewhere in order to do or perform, but rather to learn from.

As client engagement manager, I lead the work that we do with all of our partner schools. Right now, that means I manage the majority of our school accounts, and need to be in-the-know about the school accounts that fall under my colleagues’ management.

And what does managing a school account mean?

Well, I work with schools and teachers from the initial program request — determining both the educational goals as well as the logistical constraints like travel dates, budget, chaperone ratio, accommodation needs, etc. — through proposal development and student recruitment, and then if they reach the minimum number of students, I work with them through all the logistics that are needed ahead of departure, like gathering student health and diet info, getting waivers signed, making sure they’ve got their preferred flight paths, holding pre-departure calls with families and chaperones, and following up after the program ends for feedback. Throughout all of this, I work with our ops team who are the ones doing all that logistical planning on the travel side of things.

I also get to travel a few times a year myself! Along with local guides, all of our Insight programs have a global facilitator, who helps take the logistical piece off of the teacher chaperones’ plates so that teachers can focus on their students’ well-being and learning. The facilitator highlights the educational goals every day of the program through questions of the day and daily reflections. Aside from attending our annual staff retreat and facilitator training or work conferences, I get to travel as a facilitator myself a couple times a year. In a couple weeks, I’m heading to facilitate a program in the Yukon in northwest Canada, and in May, I’ll be going to Australia.

It’s a completely different job from teaching, but there’s still a lot of variety in what I do (one of the things I loved about teaching). I work with teachers and schools daily, work directly with students when I facilitate, and get to follow along on all of our programs through the facilitators’ daily updates. The feedback from them and our teachers lets me know I am still making a positive impact on students’ lives, even though I’m not in the classroom anymore.

If you’re a high school teacher whose school runs travel programs, I definitely encourage you to check us out. Our new website just launched this week! And who knows, I’ll probably be the first person you connect with 🙂