Chad Schempp — ALI Recruiting Director
Chad Schempp has certainly been well served by tennis in his career path, and it all began by playing on a California state championship team at Vista High School.
He moved on to UC Santa Barbara, where he chose to focus on his studies and not play tennis at the collegiate level.
Even so, he still kept interested in tennis. And being at UC Santa Barbara ultimately led him to SDSU’s American Language Institute where he has been the ALI recruiting director since September.
During Schempp’s junior year of college, he participated in Semester at Sea, where students sailed around the world for five months and made stops in 14 countries. Their assignment: Explore each country for several days, come back onboard the ship and write research papers for classes concerning the country they just visited.
“I had a passion to work with international students from that point on,” he said. “That’s what has led me to my current job and related jobs.”
Upon graduating from college, he worked for a government insurance office in downtown Sydney, Australia. But the tennis bug never left him, so his next job was teaching tennis in Saipan, a commonwealth of the United States near Guam.
Schempp went from there to Japan, where he still had visions of teaching tennis on a full-time basis. But a technicality prevented him from getting a work visa teaching tennis, so he taught English to obtain his work visa and taught tennis in the evenings and on weekends.
“I started to enjoy teaching English more than tennis,” said Schempp, who worked as an associate professor at a Japanese junior college teaching and advising students who desired to study abroad.
After that, he was recruited to help create and teach at an in-house language school for 2,000 General Electric employees in Japan.
From there, it was back to San Diego County as director of an international student program at Mira Costa College in Oceanside. Around that time, he married his wife who is from Japan, so they decided to move to Hawaii in order to be halfway between their two families. While there, he worked as director of graduate admissions for Hawaii Pacific University.
The Schempps then decided to move back from Hawaii five months ago to be closer to his entire family that lives in San Diego. And speaking of family, Chad said there is nothing like the family atmosphere at the ALI.
“People here are unbelievably friendly,” he said. “I’m impressed and surprised by how long people have worked here on average. When I went to the (SDSU) staff awards luncheon, I was surrounded by fellow employees who had been here 20 years or more. People obviously enjoy it, which is great.”
