About Me

In school, I performed about as well as the average student. To put it mildly, when my classmates and teachers found out that I had won a scholarship from the United States government (FLEX – Future Leaders Exchange), they were taken aback. The hallways of the school were eerily silent and people stared at me as I passed. But I was unstoppable, and so in 2000-2001, I spent a year in the United States (the state of Washington specifically) attending a local high school and living with a typical American family. Taking advantage of this chance didn’t cost me anything monetarily, but it did demand a great deal of confidence and initiative.
 
I learned a lot from the experience of winning that competition (the odds were somewhere around one in a hundred). In the first place, you should not care what others think of you. You are much more familiar with yourself than they are. Second, if you really want to accomplish something, you have to give it a shot, and then another, and then another. My constant mantra was, “Don’t give up.” I still follow it.
 
I returned home, finished high school, and I enrolled at Moscow’s Research University – Higher School of Economics (faculty of political science). The first academic essay I ever wrote was due in September of 2002, and I failed it miserably. Then began a very long process of developing academic expertise, first for my own use in undergrad and graduate school and then to share with my future students.

No tutorials or courses were available online back then, and our university provided no study skills instruction whatsoever. At first, I had no idea where to look for relevant articles or how to properly credit sources. I taught myself through trial and error using a combination of books, articles, and the few available online resources. It took me a long time to improve my study skills, but by the end of my fourth year of college I was getting A’s on all of my academic papers.
 
Thanks to my prior knowledge and experience, I was accepted into Lund University’s Master of Arts in European Affairs programme in Sweden. And I finally achieved the status of “A student” across the board for the first time in my educational career.
 
Why did it finally happen then?
 
In the end, it was all quite straightforward. I loved learning new things and analysing them in depth, as I was naturally inquisitive and possessed excellent reasoning skills. Unfortunately, this was not something I placed much importance on while pursuing a BA, but it has since become one of my greatest strengths as I have worked toward my MA. That Master’s was completed in 2007, and I went on to earn another Master’s with honours in 2009 from University College London and Charles University in Prague. In my case, I was able to pay for all of my schooling with aid from various scholarship and grant programmes.
 
I started my doctorate programme in 2009 and haven’t stopped doing research since. In 2010, I began assisting BA students in acquiring the fundamental knowledge and abilities necessary to excel in their studies. The academic path I took wasn’t the one I wanted to show my students. Learning ought to be exciting and engaging, not arduous and boring. Learning the necessary academic and scientific skills for academic success is possible, and it is much easier to do so with the guidance of a teacher or mentor than to fend for oneself in a largely unfamiliar environment.
 
Since then, I have lectured on academic skills to students at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. My processes and methods are original creations of mine. I’ve written articles that have been published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. After successfully defending my dissertation in 2013, I have held positions as a lecturer and researcher at several institutions. And it’s a great reward for me when my students and clients develop a passion for learning about the world of research and discovery that matches my own.