From August to November 2025, an immigrant from Turkey and I learned together about how hard it is for new people to the US to learn the English language, express their thoughts, and show their aptitude in professional situations.

Busra moved to DC from Istanbul in 2020, largely due to the lack of opportunity in her country caused by COVID. When she moved here, she knew very little of the language and culture, having to adjust to a new world that itself was suffering from a global pandemic. She wanted to get into the growing field of Digital Forensics, but recognized that she would need to both get more education and learn the language first before she could really break in.

As the saying goes, help comes to those who help themselves, and she decided to enroll in a local college to get a master’s degree in cybersecurity and IT. She also started volunteering for “Women in Cyber” organizations, helping girls and young women feel more confident about stepping into this male-dominated field. In many ways, she was doing essentially everything possible that she could, but she still suffered from one critical piece: She didn’t know English very well.

So, around 2022, she started taking English lessons from the Washington English Center to improve her skills. With time and effort, she was able to drastically enhance her command of the language and was even able to secure a job in Digital Forensics as a result. However, though she was able to make it through the interview, it turns out that she still had a lot to learn: She was constantly berated and maligned because of seemingly poor English skills, and she herself found it extremely difficult to explain professional and technical topics in English. In just 6 months, she was laid off.

That’s when she and I met in the fall of 2025, as she rejoined the Washington English Center to improve her gaps in English while looking for new jobs. It was my first time volunteering for the organization, and I was extremely motivated to help, considering my parents (immigrants from India) had gone through much of the same thing 30 years ago.

We met weekly, and at the beginning of the lessons, we introduced ourselves and talked about our goals. It was clear to me from the very first meeting that she didn’t suffer from an English problem, but from a confidence problem. Not that I blame her: She had spent years working toward getting a job in Digital Forensics, just to basically get laughed at for her accent (and I’m assuming being a woman among a 95% male workspace didn’t help either). As someone who has felt like an outsider many times before, I decided then and there that I was going to do everything possible to help her.

Her main personal goal at the moment was to get another job, so we decided that we would focus our lessons on interview preparation for this specific industry. Every single week, I would act like a progressively harder interviewer, and she would answer to the best of her ability; after each question, I would give her feedback both to the content of her answer and on her English skills.

But as I said above, her English skills were not the problem at all–in fact, I was legitimately surprised as to why she felt like she needed the lessons since her English was much farther above than I thought she was giving herself credit for. So, from the very first lesson, I told her, “You do not need English help. I am not going to give you English help. Rather, I am going to help make you more confident in the skills you already have so you can nail your interviews.”

So that’s what we did for the next 10 weeks: Practice interview questions. While I am, of course, proud of Busra for all the incredible time and effort she put in to prepare for each weekly session and learn from my feedback, I must humbly say that I am also proud of myself for the time I put in to learn about digital forensics. Before we started, I had absolutely no idea that the field existed, but I would prepare every week by learning about the subject, looking at YouTube videos, and even reading through an entire 80-page book of interview questions to get a feel of what employers cared about. When the person you’re trying to help shows an incredible amount of commitment, all you want to do is reciprocate with your own commitment!

We went through technical questions, like “Tell me about how to solve ___ problem in Digital Forensics,” and behavioral questions, like “Tell me about yourself.” I want to note that while we definitely practiced the content of her answers (i.e., WHAT should be said), I spent a lot of time with her practicing the delivery of her answers (i.e., HOW it should be said). 

The main thing we both realized pretty quickly was that she was so focused on trying to have the “perfect” answer that she ended up sounding both robotic and boring. At first, her answers were very vague and impersonal, filled with buzzwords. My biggest piece of advice to her was that a great answer to any question is personal and “shows evidence.” By evidence, I mean that she could actually point to a specific experience that she had that illustrates why the answer is true for her. Soon enough, she started revealing her unique knowledge and skillset throughout our lessons, and by the end of it, she gave her answers like it was a conversation, without hesitation and with emotion, as expected from the strong experiences she has had.

This paid off: She continued to interview, of course, throughout our process, and she actually got a job just 9 weeks into our 11-week program! Again, this is a testament to how much work she put in and just the incredible natural talent and intelligence she had hidden under a lack of self-confidence. I’ll never forget meeting every week, excited to hear about the new update she had on her job search: One week, it was applying for a job that looks interesting; the next week, it’s getting a phone call interview; the next, its getting selected for a zoom interview; and finally, an in-office interview with senior management that resulted in a job offer.

This was an incredible experience for me as well, being able to share that journey with her. I still look forward to seeing her updates on LinkedIn. Hopefully, the lessons that we learned together stick with both of us for the rest of our lives!