Sonu SoniUAE
Holding out for the Gulf. And getting there.
Holding out for a chemistry classroom in the Gulf.
- Now
- Chemistry teacher, with a teaching post in the UAE
- Before
- Turned down interview calls from within India
- Interview
- Four rounds: general, demo, head of department, principal
- Programme
- About five months with Suraasa, by her own count
Sonu was teaching chemistry in India and set on the Gulf, turning down interview calls at home while no route abroad appeared. A job-portal notification led to four rounds, general, demo, head of department and principal, and a teaching post in the UAE.
Saying no at home.
Sonu Soni found her openings through the job portal on the Suraasa platform. It sent notifications and she checked them. Some turned into interview calls from within India. She did not take them up. “I didn’t accept it there because I was always looking for UAE,” she says. Offers from schools in India had come through Suraasa too. “But my aim was UAE.”
When the first UAE call arrived, she accepted the invitation. The reply took almost ten days, and then the interview process began. “I was totally unaware that it happened so soon, so immediately,” she says. By her own reckoning she had been with Suraasa for “four or five months, five months I think”. “I was totally not expecting this.”
Four rounds, one subject.
The first interview was, in her words, “a very simple, just general round”. The second was her demo. The third and fourth were conversations with the head of department and then the principal. The questions were strict throughout, she says, on teaching and pedagogical skills and on chemistry, “no doubt in that, as my subject area”.
The week before the interview she was in a face-to-face session on the boosting employability module with a few other candidates, where the faculty ran interactive, game-based sessions to get them ready for interviews like this one. “I’m so lucky, let me tell you,” she says. Those sessions were in her mind when the interview came. “I never thought that I’ll be so much skilled and so much confident before interview, during the interview and after also.”
I prepared thoroughly through all these learning modules, and for interview only from these modules and these articles available on boosting employability.
Help when the marks dipped.
The assignments did not always go well. “I was not able to understand what should I do, I am getting less marks,” she says. She got in touch directly with a mentor, who gave her his time three or four times, whenever she asked. One set of video modules stayed with her more than the rest. “Maybe I’m a visual learner,” she says. “The way he speaks and the way he shows the examples, I always remember it.”
She says she is already using what she learnt, on handling children and on moral education among other things. “We know all these things, this is the fact of teacher’s life,” she says. The difference is applying them and doing the activities in the classroom. She wrote to Suraasa to say thank you. “I’m confident because I know what I have to go and do.”
