Summer isn't how we planned it -- but Hermiona is here to help! Our second session of HermionaU is starting on Monday, July 13th. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the courses I personally found most interesting.
Writing and Revising the College Application Essay
Polina Ivanova
One’s ability to write a compelling essay has relatively little to do with one’s overall writing skills. Unfortunately, even though essay writing is an extremely useful skill that can be applied to nearly any career path, it is often criminally ignored in our education system. Moreover, despite constituting such an important part of the college application process, students are altogether never taught how to write the application essay. As a result, even a small amount of review can go an extremely long way in bettering one’s chances of acceptance to an elite university. Having helped countless students get accepted to the colleges of their dreams, Hermiona is an expert at this very topic.
But don’t take our word for it, the best advertisement comes straight from our many satisfied students. Here’s what one had to say -
Veronika Volevich:
"Writing a strong and engaging application essay plays a key role in evaluation of a candidate by the university faculty. However, when it comes to writing the essay, students get confused. I, personally, was not aware of how to organize my essay.
Hermiona Writing Intensive taught me to not only structure my essay, but to organize my ideas in order to deliver them properly. I learned new approaches to formulate my thoughts in a way that would engage the reader. Sessions were taught by students from top American Universities and developed my creative thinking and writing skills. Moreover, these sessions developed my communication skills. Numerous writing exercises along with peer feedback activities exercises have resulted in my completed application essay, which I am extremely proud of."
Find out more here!
Introduction to Public Speaking and Self-Presentation
Marta Molfar
Glossophobia - fear of public speaking is by far the most common phobia in the world. In fact, up to 25% of people claim to experience anxiety when it comes to public speaking. Even if you aren’t in this group, learning to eloquently convey one’s ideas to a large group is something we could all improve at. However, what I personally find most interesting about this class, as compared to the several other public speaking classes I have attended, is that in addition to covering formal business interactions, it also touches on skills that you can use in your everyday social life with friends and acquaintances. This means that you can actually apply what you learn in a much broader setting.
Another unique feature of this class is that unlike most public speaking courses, which are taught by regular actors, Introduction to Public Speaking and Self-Presentation at HermionaU is taught by Marta Molfar, a genuine practitioner of rhetoric. She has over 20 years of experience using her voice in the field. During this span, she has become one of the most famous radio hosts in Ukraine, and voiced thousands of movies, commercials, audiobooks, and more, including dubbing Glinda in Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful. She’s also lead hundreds of seminars on public speaking, vocal training, and debate, regularly garnering crowds of hundreds and thousands of attendees.
Watch her on Telekanal Kiev - one of the biggest television companies in Ukraine.
Find out more here!
Entertaining Russian
Ksenia Turkova
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent hours sitting in front of a Russian textbook, praying that the 50,000 different verbs of motion and ridiculous numbering system (why is 21 singular?!!!) magically get absorbed into your brain. Alas, it was not meant to be. Fortunately, in this class, Ksenia Turkova attempts to tackle this very issue by teaching students Russian language from a perspective that is engaging and exciting. Her out-of-the-box methods include games, interesting ways of solving linguistic problems, and using popular media to expedite the learning process.
Ksenia is an internationally renowned journalist, linguist, and TV personality. She has also published a book called No-Stress Russian that focuses on making the language accessible to those who struggle to learn it in school. For over 20 years, she has been a news anchor for radio and TV shows around the world, ranging from Echo of Moscow in Russia to Hromadske TV in Ukraine. Ksenia currently works as a broadcast journalist for Voice of America in the United States. Another interesting fact — Ksenia is a judge for the “Word of the Year” competition!
Find out more here!
