Student Thoughts: Daria and Andrii, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)
You don’t have to study a degree achieve your goals.
After leaving their home in Ukraine in 2022, Andrii and Daria came to Scotland with little English. Now nearly three years on they have embraced their lives here in Scotland and opened their business SushiBoom.
Hi, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
We came to Scotland in 2022, fleeing the war in Ukraine.
We are from Odessa on the Black Sea coast. Before coming to Scotland, I studied IT (Andrii) and I (Daria) trained to be a secondary school teacher.
After completing our degrees, we worked in the florist business in Ukraine. This is where we met each other, before the war started. After coming to Scotland, we got married!
Why did you choose UHI Moray?
We had very little English when we arrived in Scotland and started our ESOL course at UHI Moray. We did learn some English in Ukraine, but to be honest we weren’t using and practising English and never imagined that we would end up living in Scotland and that English would become so important to us.
How did you find learning English?
We have made huge progress in our English since starting. We have progressed by 2 levels in 2 years! And we definitely notice this at our place of work – when we first arrived, we found it difficult to understand our colleagues, but now we can have conversations with Scottish people and understand so much more. We can even phone the doctors and go to the bank and do so many things that we couldn’t have done 2 years ago.
How has this impacted your lives?
The biggest impact that this course has had on our lives is that we have finally achieved our dream of starting our own sushi business here in Scotland! We could not have imagined doing this previously, but as our English improved, our confidence increased and we realised that we could make this dream a reality. On the 1st December 2024 SushiBoom was born! We now offer take away sushi which is all home-made and deliver it to our customers, giving the people of Moray the opportunity to taste what has been described as the best sushi around!!
That is amazing! One final question, advice would you give to anyone considering studying at UHI Moray?
Come to UHI Moray! It is such a friendly and open place. The lecturers are so approachable and help to make the lessons more enjoyable and less stressful.
Our ESOL courses enable non-native speakers of English to develop their English language skills at different levels through the study of reading, writing, listening and speaking skills.
Want to share your story? Get in touch: marketing.moray@uhi.ac.uk