About me
How I left my sweet home town and came to the UK to become an academic lecturer.
It wasn’t that long time ago that I lacked confidence and faith in my abilities. Fast forward past many sacrifices and long hours of work, I can comfortably say that I have achieved more than I could ever imagine.
I am now happy to support international students on their academic journey, may it be reaching an IELTS score they need to enter their dream university, improving their research skills, and receiving higher marks for their assignments.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve had the pleasure of assisting students from all over the world, and when I say ‘all over the world’, I mean students from South America, Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Asia.
I feel blessed seeing how my students grow from often (but not always) intimidated and shy teenagers to confident and ambitious young adults.
It is amazing how many people I have met, and how different and unique they are. With interests ranging from swimming with sharks (a student from Argentina) to reading and learning about classics (a student from Italy, who entered Cambridge University), my students are now finishing or have already finished their dream studies and are pursuing their life aims (another student from Italy is now working in Silicon Valley). Having taught students from China, Japan, India, Angola, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, I feel as if I have already been to all of those countries without even leaving my classroom.
From a small-town girl to a big-city academic lecturer at top UK universities.
Born in a small town in Eastern Poland, I eventually made a move and relocated to Oxford, not really knowing what this adventure would bring to my life.
In primary and then secondary school, Oxford was only an image on a dictionary cover I used for looking up unfamiliar vocabulary. Twenty years ago, I was not even dreaming of living and working in Oxford. I could barely imagine going abroad for a trip to London. But what I knew for sure was that I wanted to study English. Even though my secondary school class teacher thought I would go for a degree in engineering, which many of my friends did, I decided to follow my heart and went to university to study English Literature, History and Linguistics. After 5 years of intense work on my degrees (I hold a BA and MA in English and a BSc in Economics), I followed a career in teaching English as a second language. And this is where it all started.
So, what brought me to Oxford?
In 2014, I decided to enrol on a course for teachers, called CELTA. CELTA is a primary teaching qualifications for teachers of English as a second language. It is a must for anyone who would ever want to teach English anywhere in the world.
And then, it all started. Very quickly it turned out that I was a very good teacher of English. From the very start, I was getting ‘Above standards’ for my teaching skills. Now, I know it was not only thanks to my knowledge of English but also thanks to my 4-year experience of working as an English teacher in Poland. I was so excited about the approach to teaching English here (it was far more communicative than what we used to do in an English classroom) that I decided to stay in the UK for longer. Quite unexpectedly, I was offered a job as an English teacher at British Study Centres in Oxford. Unfortunately, after two months, it turned out that I had to go back to Poland. But, as you can guess, I came back to Oxford in the summer of 2015 and have stayed here ever since. This time around, I got a job at EF Oxford, where I stayed till May 2020. During that time I became a University Preparation Tutor. Not only did I grow as a teacher, but also as a person. I have gained new teaching skills, explaining complex concepts to students from different nationalities and backgrounds. I have also become more sensitive to multicultural differences. In 2019, I earned prestigious DELTA qualifications in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
How it all started
