It takes an immense amount of courage to leave everything you know behind — your family, friends, everything that’s familiar — and move to an entirely new country and embrace an entirely new culture. But that’s exactly what three Alpha Phis from Beta Epsilon- Arizona, Lambda-Berkeley and Iota Eta-DePaul did.
life could look like in Australia and turned to her Alpha Phi network on LinkedIn where she ultimately made a life- changing connection. “I reached out to a sister I'd never met before named Michelle Barry (Eta Alpha-New Hampshire) who was living in Queensland at the time just to see if she had any advice for someone who was interested in living overseas like she had done. Even though Michelle was a decade ahead of me in her career and the only thing that tied us together was our shared experience as Alpha Phis, Michelle quickly responded and gave me her advice and encouragement on how to make the jump. I moved a few years later with a recruiting role at a tech company and ended up spending nearly eight years in Australia before moving for work again in 2022 to Japan.” Megan currently lives in Tokyo with her pug, Miche, and works in a strategy role for a global real estate company. She loves exploring the culture, the food and the city every day, and trying to pick up as much of the language as she can.
In fact, two of these women still live abroad.
And the third? She turned her passion for travel into an exciting career wherein she empowers other women to see the world. In this feature story, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the life stories of three outstanding Alpha Phis who embarked on international adventures after graduating from college to advance both their careers and their personal development, making a global impact and advancing women worldwide. Do you know any Alpha Phis who meet this description? We’d love to hear about them! Email us directly at quarterly@alphaphi.org with the member’s name, chapter and LinkedIn page if you have it.
Let’s get to know her better!
What was your favorite part of living in Australia those eight years after college? There's so much to love about Australia, but I think my favorite thing about living there was how much of an adventurous and entrepreneurial spirit exists in the culture. Aussies love to travel and so many young Australians spend time traveling, living and studying abroad that it was easy to find likeminded friends that wanted to go out and explore. I found that my friendship group had an incredibly global perspective on the world, and it included expats and locals alike. My least favorite aspect of living in Australia was the length of the flight from Sydney to anywhere else. I got very good at sleeping on planes! You live in Tokyo now. What prompted that move from Sydney, and how do you like living in Japan? I currently work in people strategy for a global real estate company where my job is to make sure we're set up to employ in all the markets we operate in and that we have the right systems in place for things like hiring, compensation and workforce management. My current company sponsored the move, which allows me to live and work in Japan while also working virtually with team members all around the world. I love living in Tokyo! It's such a simultaneous mix of old and new. On one hand, it’s a city of incredible technological advancement and hyper-optimized processes that make living in a density of 14 million people feel spacious, clean and safe. On the other hand, Japan has a culture deeply rooted in tradition, and it's not uncommon to see the continued practice of traditional crafts like ikebana [the
Megan
Megan Beale (Lambda-Berkeley) Megan Beale can date her desire to live abroad back to her freshman year of college when she moved from her small hometown of Cochranville, Pennsylvania, to the wildly diverse campus of UC Berkeley where there was more representations of cultures she had never experienced before. In the years after graduating as she was thinking about the next steps she wanted to take in life, Megan wondered what
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