Meet Yekaterina From University Settlement

My name is Yekaterina. I am from Kazakhstan. It’s really far from here—it’s close to Russia. I’ve been living in New York for about two years now.

I like to go out for fun and just to walk around New York because there’s still a lot of places that I didn’t visit yet. And there’s always something new you can find on the street.

I speak Russian, that’s my first language, I speak English, Chinese, and Ukrainian.

My friend told me that there is a program in Manhattan that provides intensive English classes. Adult Literacy helped me a lot and our teacher was great. His name was Jay, and he was a great teacher—he taught me a lot and I learned a lot from him.

My goals were to find a place in the United States, to start a new life and first of all I needed to know the language that people speak around me to find a good job and to fit in the society.
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I found my first job at University Settlement at Adult Literacy. While working as an office assistant, I learned a lot about the environment in the office. That’s the first thing that was a bit different for me because that was the first time that I worked in the United States and everything is new. So that was a big, huge step for me here in the United States to get a job in the office.

Thanks to Adult Literacy I found another job, a full-time job, at University Settlement at the Consultation Center. The Consultation Center is a mental health clinic at University Settlement. We help people who struggle with mental health issues and I am an administrative assistant there. I’m happy to have that job because, again, it helps you a lot when you move from another country and you start your life from zero to get a full-time job in an office and with a good environment—it’s amazing!
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I want to tell you that program is an amazing program, Adult Literacy is an amazing program, because you can find a program that’s free and it’s intensive English and they help you with your job, they help you to build your resume, they help you to study English, and there’s so many things that this program helped me with. So I’m really grateful for that.