"Early in my career, I worked mostly in administrative positions. I worked at a school, a non-profit and law offices. Most of my days were spent behind a computer and I had fewer opportunities to interact directly with people. Volunteering in the community helped me remedy this situation. I mentored ESL students at an elementary school. I also volunteered as a conversation partner at a program for adults.  These experiences allowed me to interact with people from different cultures and help them better themselves. I enjoyed these experiences so much that I wanted them to turn into a career. I continued to volunteer with immigrant organizations because I wanted to ensure that teaching ESL was the right career choice for me. This led me to take an intensive, fourteen-week TESOL certification course. The course trained me to teach adults and I enjoyed working with the students and other TESOL professionals.

The course really got me excited about teaching. I was clueless about how to structure lessons and the skills needed to help students learn.  I learned teaching theories and practices that work best for ESL students. Each class was interactive and gave me ideas on how to teach students in my future classroom. The best part of the course was the supportive environment sustained by my classmates and instructors. We helped each other build confidence in delivering lessons to the students at Rennert.

TESOL is a field where you are constantly learning.  After the program, I taught an ESL course to a group of senior citizens at a community center. I used the lesson planning skills I learned in the course to create units that were specifically targeted to their needs and interests. I also applied to the TESOL graduate school program at Hunter College because I wanted to learn how to teach ESL to children.

In graduate school, I had many opportunities to work with students in New York City classrooms and build my confidence in teaching young children. I also had the opportunity to conduct theory-based research. The idea for my master's thesis came from the summer I spent teaching intermediate and advanced students at Rennert. I often brought my laptop to class and would supplement the lessons using audio, pictures, and video. This inspired me to conduct research on how technology could be used to help ESL students in the classroom and I presented my research on how the iPad could be used to help students develop literacy skills at the New York State TESOL conference in November.