If somebody had told me a decade ago, when I was an English major in Russia, that I would be teaching an online Portuguese class for Framingham State University (FSU), I would have laughed … or cried. To dream that big, that far, would be too painful. It is Professors Richard Signes, Michael Wong-Russell, Emilce Cordeiro, Lauren Taylor-Fernandes, and Marguerite Mahler who had to first carve that dream out for me and then make me see it, while continuously giving their support as I was starting to take the road toward that dream.

Even before they helped me to discern the way to become a college foreign language and literature teacher, FSU had already become a beacon for me. Upon coming to the United States from Russia in 2007, I started taking English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at FSU: first the Test of English as a Foreign Language and then American English Pronunciation. In 2008, I came back for more as a transfer student determined to finish the bachelor’s degree that I started in Russia. In two years, the World Languages Department professors helped me learn Spanish and find out, accidentally, that also I loved teaching Spanish.

They didn’t give me any other choice but send my application to a graduate school. “You do not have to go if you get in, but you cannot get in without taking a chance,” they said. All I needed to do is to fill out applications. The rest – the support, the letters of recommendation and their priceless advice – was always there.

On a spring day, a couple of months after my FSU graduation, while getting ready for my first day of work, I accidentally checked my spam mailbox – something I never do – only to find out that I was accepted to Boston University with a full teaching fellowship. Now that I’m finishing my doctorate degree, I know that everything started at FSU. I have grown so much during these nine years that whenever I come back to FSU, I feel like entering my childhood. It’s the place where I took my first steps toward being who I want to be. But it is the wonderful people at FSU who found out, long before I did, who that person was, the person who is writing this big “thank you” to them now.