My Deep Interest In Teacher Assistant Program

You may be wondering why is a Certified Public Translator interested on being a Spanish teacher assistant. You may ask why would a person who has studied for five years to become a Translator wants to spend nine months working as anything else. You may also ask why would this person quit her permanent job in order to live a nine months experience. Through this essay, I will try to answer these questions.

First of all, I need to answer why am I willing to spend nine months working on something else other than translating. I do love translating, and I do want to spend the rest of my life as a translator, but before I took the decision to be one, I just loved the English language. Back on2001, when I was five years old, I asked my parents to take me to study English. Since March2001, I was absent to my English classes only when I was sick. I was the only student in my class who was there because she had asked her parents to be there. All of my classmates were there because their parents considered it was fundamental to learn English for their futures.

So then, when I was in high school and I had to start to figure out how would I like my future to be, I decided that the English language must be present every day of my life. But, why did I choose translating over teaching? I did because interpretation fascinated me. So I started college with the objective to become an English translator and interpreter. But, during college, I realized I wanted to start working during my free time on the mornings. I thought it was not enough to graduate, to be a professional, but one without job experience.

On this willing to start working I found the perfect occasion to experience what I had left aside: teaching English. Fortunately, I found someone who believed on my skills and who was interested on the knowledge I had of the language, and I began to teach. During the first months, I was learning with my students. They helped me to find my own ways to teach them everything I knew and to learn from them. But I also learned a lot about teaching thanks to that person who had believed on me once and did it twice when she chose me to enroll on teaching course. I took the Teaching Knowledge Test course and exam, which not only gave me multiple teaching skills, but also encouraged me to continue with this journey. Some months later I wanted to share my knowledge with more kids and to learn from other teachers and students, so I began to work at a school too, a different experience since English was one of many subjects for the students.

Although my students were showing me how much I enjoyed to teach, I was about to graduate from college and I needed to focus on my career. During my last year of college I had more free time, reason why I quit teaching and I began to work at Zonamerica, a free zone, every day for 6 hours. I worked there for nine months, during which I learned what is it to have coworkers and to spend my days with them. Then, on December 2017, I lived the day that I had been dreaming about for years: the day of my graduation. That day was one of the happiest days of my life, since all the efforts of studying and working at the same time were worthwhile. After having studied for five years to become a Certified Public Translator and Interpreter, of course I wanted to work as one, but I knew it was not that easy. Being a freelance translator requires many years of experience and many clients. For that reason, I decided to find a job related to what I have studied and which at the same time allowed me to begin to find my first clients. With that in mind, I began to look for a new job, and I found it inTrafigura. Nowadays I have been working in Trafigura since January 2018 as a Contracts Analyst. Although I do not translate there, I draft and revise contracts in English. As a Certified Public Translator, this job is teaching me a lot about the structure of a contract and about vocabulary of the trading business.

Now that you know something else about me, you may still be wondering why would I quit to this job and to the possibility of translating during nine months. The answer is that I need to give myself a second chance with teaching. I feel that my studies at college gave me a lot of knowledge about the Spanish language that I want to share with others. I believe I have three fundamental strengths for teaching Spanish: the teaching skills, a deep knowledge about the language, and the willing to share that knowledge through those skills. I also believe that this experience will help me improve my teaching skills and to bring back the teacher I have inside.

I am sure that when I come back from this incredible journey I will be ready to start a new life full of the unforgettable experiences and learnings that it will give me. And I am also sure that thanks to the FLTA program I will be able to have a life in which I can do what I love: translating and sharing my knowledge through teaching.