Hi! I’m Mariia. Since 2018, I worked in IT, and in 2023 I joined the Teach for Ukraine Fellowship program by the Teach for Ukraine NGO. I spent the whole school year teaching English at Velykodymersky Lyceum, part of the Velykodymerska settlement council in Brovary district, Kyiv region. Why did I leave my project manager job and move out of the city to teach for a year? Here’s my story.
I started my IT path in a big company as a sales specialist, then became a marketing manager. When COVID hit, I tried working on a small IT project as a project manager. That’s where I got the basics of managing development processes: learned necessary tools, figured out what SDLC is, and what software development really means. It took overtime work and many courses: I studied not only project management but also business analysis and testing because I knew these skills were essential to work well with teams.
Before the full-scale war, I worked at my last job for a year and a half, then quit and didn’t work for four months. Later, I joined a large company in Ukraine involved in a huge project with a team of about 70 people.
Unfortunately, the level of responsibility I was ready to take didn’t match what the company was willing to give me. There was a lot of micromanagement and few opportunities to make decisions or implement them. I worked there only eight months; after five months, I already knew I was going to teach.
By then, I had already started teaching: I delivered an “Introduction to IT” course mainly aimed at internally displaced women. This experience introduced me to smart, motivated women facing extremely tough life situations: displaced from Kherson; alone because their husband is at war; raising a child with disabilities; the sole breadwinner of the family…
I saw how these women blossomed in weeks, transforming from completely “green” and confused to asking technical questions, understanding and using terminology, and completing complex tasks. I realized this was incredibly valuable and probably more meaningful than working on projects.
At that point, I felt a gap between my full-time job and my real values, and it made me uncomfortable. Of course, the full-scale war in Ukraine also influenced my decisions: life changed, and ignoring many societal problems was impossible.Свій шлях в ІТ почала з великої компанії, де працювала сейлз, а згодом маркетинг-менеджеркою. З початком ковіду спробувала працювати на маленькому ІТ-проєкті у ролі РМ. Саме там я отримала базові навички для управління процесом розробки: опанувала необхідні інструменти для управління роботою, розібралась в понятті SDLC і що взагалі таке програмне забезпечення. Для цього довелось працювати понаднормово і проходити багато курсів: вчилася не тільки управління проєктами, але і бізнес-аналізу й тестування, бо розуміла, що ці навички мені потрібні для ефективної роботи з командами.
One day, I accidentally saw an article about Teach for Ukraine — an NGO tackling educational inequality in small towns by recruiting specialists from various fields to teach there. This was the start of their 2023 recruitment campaign.
I saw this story before bedtime and got a bit scared because I realized this was a crazy chance to change something radically. One message stuck with me: “Your first impactful job.” I remember reevaluating my career in that moment. I’d done a lot in life, worked in many places, but was it really an impactful job? What influence did I have? What kind of impact did I have that another manager wouldn’t?
The selection process had six stages, but I wasn’t deterred because I believed I had a real shot. So, I just filled out the application and six months later—hello students, I’m your English teacher.
At each step, I knew what was expected and what I could give the program. The selection felt very organic: application, recorded automated interview, online interview, subject test in English, demo lesson at the Assessment Center, and an intensive Summer Institute.
The Assessment Center was a bit stressful: besides group work, I had to deliver a short 15-minute lesson to real students. I came armed with memes, idioms, and tools and thought I nailed it. Now, with solid methodological knowledge, I look back and cringe a bit, realizing you can’t really teach kids English that way.
The next step was the Summer Institute, a six-week intensive course in pedagogy, psychology, and teaching methodology — one of the most concentrated educational experiences of my life. We were split into communities based on where we’d teach. When I found out I’d be teaching at Velykodymersky Lyceum, the first thing I did was Google whether there was a “Sportlife” gym there. I was naive.
That’s when I quit software development. Only three people in my circle supported me; the rest didn’t understand what I was doing, why, or whether I was serious. One colleague even wrote: “Maria, you’re the only person I know who wants to leave IT, not join it.”
During summer, I rested, recovered from constant stress, and prepared to teach. I read a lot about global teaching approaches, studied state standards for secondary and higher education, reviewed curricula, learned how English is taught, checked methodical recommendations, journal filling rules, and took all courses about the New Ukrainian School, project-based learning, and inclusivity.
In September 2023, my first lesson happened — it was with 10th graders. At first, they thought I didn’t speak Ukrainian and wasn’t Ukrainian, which made them very curious.
I found it fascinating to see how my management experience helped me with kids. There’s way more management in school than you’d imagine. Classroom management is like Scrum at max level. The flexibility needed in school was more than I ever showed in any project. You have to make endless decisions in one lesson, dealing with active, still maturing personalities, and you’re the main manager of the whole process.
Kids might try to “manage” it their way, but you’re responsible for the result and must be ready for anything they do or don’t do. To get any outcome from a lesson, you need millions of different plans and not lose your cool.
Before school, I researched how Scrum is adapted for education. The Scrum ceremonies developers follow are adjusted for school needs, with concepts like spring goals, work backlog, performance review, and definition of done.
Though these things feel worlds apart from Ukrainian education’s reality, I had room for pedagogical creativity and adapted my teaching process to kids’ needs the way Scrum taught me.
I came to school prepared but left a completely different person. I understood how hard it is for kids, always felt for them, but eventually accepted that loving kids and showing them love is wonderful, yet they also desperately need norms and boundaries. If they don’t see those from adults, they feel discomfort and lose respect for adults and teachers.
Kids really want love but also discipline. They need adults to show what’s allowed and what’s not. Sometimes they told me, “You just need to yell at us, and we’ll sit quietly.” It hurt to hear they accepted emotional abuse as normal, so I knew I had to give them an alternative: discipline that’s still humane and considers their age and needs.
Everything I saw in adult teams was also in kids: procrastination, lack of motivation, weak discipline, the urge to cheat when you haven’t done your part but don’t want to admit it.
Working on projects with kids was especially enlightening. I put them in project groups, randomly assigned so they’d learn to work with different people, even uncomfortable ones. I gave them work and several lessons to do it.
I saw the same challenges I see in IT adult teams: focusing on form over content, shirking responsibility, poor communication and coordination, unwillingness to work if you don’t understand the task. But also genuine excitement when the product is interesting and the manager clearly communicated goals and processes.
What I saw in IT works with kids. Emotions don’t have age, so emotional attitudes toward work are similar across ages. This made me realize we’re all “molded” in childhood: if you weren’t taught teamwork in school, you won’t learn it on your own, and your manager will struggle to teach you as an adult. Adults are notoriously hard to teach, especially if they don’t see the need.
Reflecting on how teaching affects my work with adults, I realize I’ll be way more demanding of teams now. My experience showed me that if a 12-year-old can link their efforts to results, so can an adult developer—and that’s the minimum standard.
Also, both kids and adults take failures very hard. They need a growth mindset: normalizing failure, bad grades, and understanding that the difference between good and bad results depends on work amount and analysis quality.
Don’t treat failure as a constant or fixed fact. Approach your skills, effort, and motivation consciously, openly accept and give feedback, aim for high quality—and you’ll grow. School taught me that retrospectives are the most important ceremony for a team, and skipping them signals weak management and team.
I’m very grateful for this experience—it truly changed my life. When I meet someone wanting a radical change, I share my golden rule: “There’s no reason you can’t manage.” Today, I only fear rockets; everything else—unemployment, low pay, stressful jobs, difficult clients—seems trivial because there’s no reason I can’t handle it.
Author: Mariia Chunys, Teach for Ukraine Fellowship alumna
