Service

Volunteering and activities

Work given rather than sold. I have tried to record it at its real size, because service described vaguely tends to be service exaggerated. Both of these are ongoing, and the longer of the two has been running for four years.

September 2025 to present

Every Wednesday

Local state primary school, special educational needs

Volunteer

I volunteer every Wednesday at local primary schools, and my group and I have focused on a state school for children with special educational needs. The work has taught me patience and resilience, because the children sometimes refuse to listen or to speak to me, and the session has to work anyway. It remains genuinely difficult, and I keep going because I want to be useful to people.

June 2022 to present

Ongoing, four years

English teaching for Ukrainian refugees

Volunteer teacher

I teach English to Ukrainian refugees in my area who were displaced by the Russian invasion. Beyond the language, the work is helping people adapt to a country they did not choose and find their way into it socially. In the early period my family and I also donated gifts and everyday items. It has taken a great deal of time over four years, and it is the thing on this page I am most glad to have done.

Societies, activities and interests

Not service, but the other standing commitments on my week: the societies I belong to, and the things I have kept up longest.

Societies

Economics ClubOngoing: Where most of the arguments that end up as essays get their first hearing, and where they are usually improved by someone disagreeing with them before anything is written down.
Eastern European Society2024 to 2026: Two years in a society for Eastern European culture, history and current affairs. Russian is my first language and the region is where my family is from, so the society was partly a way of keeping that connection active rather than letting it become something I used to have.

Kept up outside school

ChessOngoing: Played regularly. The useful habit it teaches is not calculation but the discipline of asking what the other side intends before deciding what you want, which transfers to argument more directly than it has any right to.
Reading in economicsOngoing: Reading well beyond the syllabus, which is where the essays come from. A syllabus tells you what is settled; the interesting questions are the ones still being argued about, and those are only found by reading further out than you are asked to.
Drums, Grade 5September 2023 to present: I practise twice a week for an hour at a time, learning new pieces and working on technique. I am assessed each year to move up a grade.
FootballJuly 2018 to present: I train once a week and play a match each week for my local club. It is the part of the week furthest from academic work, and it keeps the rest of it in proportion.