Now, when I try to think when it all began, am terrified of the time that really flies by…If I say, that my real career choices, began with the university degree, now it makes it almost 30 years, three decades ago since my professional journey began. Since I took my first steps in new areas of business, discovering what real adult life is and isn’t.
When you are 18-19 years old, hard to say you will have a super clear view on who you want to become in future and how you want to pay for yourself in your adult life. Of course, it was my dilemma as well. I was in Economic High School but when deciding about higher education, I was simply not convinced. I graduated my High School with a real profession at hand of an accountant, how exciting was that :-). Most of my colleagues went to work at their fathers businesses or directly working for some local companies. Only a few of us decided to head for a Master Degree and University education. My problem was, my parents did not have enough money to send me to private schools, neither to send me on extra tutoring classes to catch up on topics I was struggling with. So we had no money to pay for private education…I knew if I want to study, I need to pass all the official exams to get into the state university where you don’t pay any tuition.
The problem was, first I did not know which faculty I want to pursue and what I will do in future, how will I earn my money. Second challenge I had was I liked too many things, I liked archeology, I wanted to be a spy – too many James Bond movies 🙂 I also wanted to be a fashion designer and I wanted to naturally heal people….so now you might wonder, how comes I landed in Information Technology and whether somehow, I decided to study it…nothing more wrong to think I went to study IT right away…I did many years later, when I eventually knew what I want to do in my life.
My first faculty I graduated from, was Finance & Management at University of Warsaw in Poland. How comes after dreaming about becoming a famous fashion designer (already at that time I had this giant urge of wearing nice clothes, bags and shoes; which only grew over the years), all of the sudden, I decided to pursue my career in rather boring Finance?
So answer is as simple as you can imagine: LOVE. I was secretly in love with one of my class colleagues from the high school and I decided to follow him since he wanted to study too 🙂 And guess what, he decided to study Finance and Management. The difference between us was, somehow I passed all the exams and got offered a place at the University and he did not…I was thinking, oh god, what I have done, now am stuck there and he goes somewhere else 🙂
I want to tell you that in order to pass and be admitted to the Faculty, you had to pass all the exams with an almost 100% pass rate. My big problem was the English exam, because I have never had an English class in my life… I was desperately thinking what to do, how to learn it in a week or two to pass exams where there was more than 16 people competing for one seat available and you had to pass English, Math’s, Economy and History exams. I realized that nothing is impossible, if you are smart, motivated and you know where you want to be, you will get there.
So, I started my English fast track “project” or better to say: secret mission. I figured out quickly that English university entry exam is all about grammar, so I bough an English grammar book and I memorized all the grammar rules 🙂 How clever I though it was… I did not have any vocabulary but I learn how to recognize main words and how to apply proper grammar rules. I did hundreds of prep questions and the result was…I got 29 points out of 30 for English exam 🙂 That was the exact moment I started to believe in my ability to learn and succeed in almost anything. The human brain is still unexplored, and can surprise us at every turn. I knew one day in future, I can learn anything I fancy, and I can be good at that. That’s how it started from the beginning.
Finally, I studied Finance and Management at University of Warsaw, graduating with distinctions and Master of Science degree. During the 5 years of study, I had to catch up on my English a lot. My first year of business English was a nightmare, as I could not understand anything and to pass I had to memorize a lot of text. So what I decided to do was during my first year at the University, I was giving private math tutoring classes, as well as Polish language, chemistry and physics. At one point my business was going so well, that I had as much money as, my parents together 🙂 Spending some money on clothes, but saving majority of my student income. Thanks to my good grades (except English :-)) I got a scholarship, so I had even more money and motivation. That way I had enough money to travel for work to the States during my summer breaks. My summer breaks were longer than usual, as I was taking all final exams around beginning of May, and then heading to the US for five to six months of work and travel.
My first trip to US was with Camp America, I got a job at one of their summer camps in Main, forests, lakes and millions of mosquitos. To go there, I had to travel over 30 hours by bus to London, then find my way to Heathrow Airport, sleeping there another day and eventually heading to Boston. When going there, I was already after my first year of university, when I really worked hard on my English skills and I thought at least I can understand a bit….total mistake… I could not understand the bloody thing.
My first job was a cleaner, then after one month I got upgraded to the kitchen and I was responsible for the salad bar, later I was doing some other extra jobs in the kitchen and sanitatories (this function was better paid, no wonder why :-)).
I was the only person from Eastern Europe there, surrounded by native speakers only. I remember this one girl, Claire from UK, god she gave me such a hard time, she was pointing at me as silly, dummy Polish girl, only because I had difficulties to understand her “sophisticated” vocabulary. I cried practically every night when no one could see me, as they would give me even a harder time.
That exact moment when working hard 6 days a week for many, many hours, practically from the sunrise to the sunset and even later, I realized that this is my life and I need to face it. It was my very first moment of truth. I started reading a lot of books from the camp library, I started sleeping in front of TV when watching movies, I kind of surrounded myself with English. Reading books was a nightmare, I could not understand a thing and had no dictionary with me…there was no Polish-English dictionary at the camp, at the end why would they have one…I was so exotic to them that they did not know how to talk to me.
Bear in mind we are talking about mid 90’s of previous century. My God, this sounds like am terribly old – from the previous century 🙂 Gosh!!!
So after torturing myself with American books, American radio stations, people at work and American movies, somehow magically I realize that I understand words one by one and somehow I know what am reading and what they are talking about. It was amazing, I still remember the feeling one day, I managed to learn like a small kid, from everything I was surrounded with. It was like a little miracle of a door opening in my brain and helping me to achive my goal: learn English, be able to speak easily.
This is how my journey started… This is about how I accidentally chose the field of study, how much effort I had to put into learning the language and how I didn’t let myself get bullied by others.
A story of my life. I learnt a very tough lessons from life but it only made me stronger, more motivated, self-driven, unstoppable and open to any new opportunities that might occur on my life path.
In my next post, I would like to share what was my first job after getting my master degree and how I landed in my first real full-time job when still on the 4th out of 5th years of university education.
Stay with me…I must say that this is my second post in the last two days and it feels great! I love talking and I love sharing so this blog is an ideal space for me.
Stay tunned. I hope you enjoyed!
I will be back, maybe even tomorrow 🙂
IT & She 
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