I’ve always loved logical things – maybe that’s why I ended up tutoring.
For six years I tutored maths, physics and later programming. At first it just looked like a better way to earn money than standing at the grill in McDonald’s, but I quickly fell in love with teaching, and to some extent it has been part of my life ever since.
In 2012, at Kandó (the electrical engineering faculty of Óbuda University), I started getting into programming more seriously. At the end of the semester, a helpful teacher offered to host anyone who wanted to spend the summer studying instead of on holiday. Not many people want to study in the summer, so I had plenty of free time, and by then I had pretty much lost the habit of doing nothing. I started going to the university five days a week, eight hours a day. At the start of each week the teacher handed out a pile of tasks, and every few days we reviewed and refactored my solutions – it was an instructive time. Towards the end of the summer I sat in on the programming labs for distance-learning students and helped teach the material. I was hooked on teaching at university right away; back then I was even considering becoming a technical teacher. A few weeks later I found myself running labs as a teaching assistant. The funny part is that I had just switched campuses that summer, so it added some colour to fitting in that I was teaching the labs for a third of my own classmates. The following year I commuted between labs and tutoring. Of course there were classes I had to attend, but mostly I studied while travelling.
I started the next year as an intern at Bosch, so for a while I parted ways with university teaching, but I kept tutoring for a few more years.
The next opportunity came at Evosoft: teaching programming at the University of Dunaújváros. A company-wide email announced the collaboration, and I jumped on it straight away. That gave me another year of teaching.
After that I worked on a YouTube channel for a year. Somehow I’ve never managed to publish this idea of mine: a programming course for children, based on Scratch. I came up with it about five years ago and I keep getting closer to the goal, but talking in front of a camera is a long way from where I started.
Finally, I ended up at a children’s home, where I tutored maths and put together a programming day camp for the kids – but I’ll write more about that in a post about volunteering.