My Autobiography

Neiva, Huila, Colombia. 2019

My Autobiography

Hello, my name is Oscar and this my autobiography from a different point of view. This is my journey through the depths of my mind to find out how I discovered what I wanted to do in life and why.

Firstly, I am finishing my university studies in the English Language Teaching Program from the College of Education at Universidad Surcolombiana, in Colombia. Why did I decide to study to be a teacher? Well, when I choose this career back in 2015, I never thought about becoming a teacher for the rest of my life. I just wanted to study English because I am passionate for learning languages and English was not the exception. That idea changed as the years passed by and by 2019, I was decided to be teacher for all the years that come by.

I never realized that this idea of being an educator started much earlier, when I was a kid. Growing in a middle-class family with not many toys and books to read, I used to play with my cousins, bother and friends pretending that we were at school. I was the teacher of course, and I used to make worksheets for them to work on, drawings for them to color, additions and subtractions for them to complete. This was the “game” that we used to play most of the time to just spend time and have a fun day. All the ideas that came to my mind at that age were from seeing and having incredible teachers as a kid, I just wanted to be like them, play with my friends, and “teaching” them in the way what I was learning at school.

As the years passed by, I started to get more mature and this game that started as a kid became more and more blurred in my life. In high school, the idea of being an engineer started to be implanted in my head thanks to a voice I heard all the time, my dad’s voice. I began to look for universities that offered programs related to the civil and industrial engineering. Although my future was not decided yet, I wanted to please my dad and myself because I wanted to achieve this goals that seemed very interesting for my future. As I said, my future was at stake due to the state examination, ICFES, for admission to public higher education.  

My score was not good, I was very disappointed and thought my parents were as well. I did not get the enough score to study an engineer career, did not know what to do, and my parents were not going to pay a private university due to the lack of financial resources. The last day for student registration I decided to study in the English Teaching Program, a decision, made by myself, that I never going to regret having taken. An important part for me was my parent´s acceptance, after all, they were going to keep paying my education and their opinion is important to me. They liked the idea, but what it surprised me the most is that the decision of studying to be in an ELT program, appeared from no-where, it just popped in my head.

What I would like to be doing in ten years from now? Well, in ten years I hope to be graduated from the program and the master program I am planning to be in. In ten years, I have already visited some countries I would like to visit and bringing back experiences that I can tell my students to encourage them to keep studying, to work hard for their dreams, and never give up. Education is the way out of that tunnel of illiteracy and a life of infliction and subjugation.

I am finishing this amazing career and I have found friends that have taught me to overcome many obstacles, teachers that have taught me to be a better person, a better human that at some point in my life this will help me to make positive life changes for others as they did for me, and a university that despite many difficulties along the path made me feel at home.