What is a CELTA course like?

Sara Walentowicz (that's a Polish surname), who is from Maryland, is fortunate to have acquired dual nationality - British as well as US citizenship - acquired just a month ago as she knew finding work in Europe was going to be tough otherwise. The ancestry on both sides of Sara's family is from Poland, though the nationality comes from her Dad having been born in Britain.

Actually getting British citizenship involved going to the British Embassy in Washington, armed with a whole pile of papers (birth certificate, and what not), and beyond good old British bureaucracy didn't in fact prove too hard.

Having dual nationality wasn't the end of the matter, however. During the course, Sara had applied for a job in the UK and got an immediate reply saying "Sorry, we can't accept you - you're American", which they must have deduced from the "Austin, Texas" bit at the top of her CV. She had clearly specified in the covering letter that she had British nationality but that had apparently been overlooked. Lesson one: put that at the top of the letter of application!

Plans for the future

So what plans did Sara have, now that the course was in its last week? Going to Poland was one possibility, with the demand there (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe) being high and the requirements as regards experience being correspondingly low. At the jobs session that forms part of the CELTA course, it had been noted, however, that with Poland due to join the EU in May 2004, it can only get tougher for non-EU citizens there, too. South America?

The American girl who was in the flat where Sara has been staying managed to find work enough to survive for eight months, even without papers. She'd done private work, putting up adverts in strategic places (the universities, to start with, though if you're here in Barcelona you'll notice how people use the lampposts in the street for the same purpose, choose a university lamppost!) and found something, at least, with a small school rather less scrupulous than they ought to be about papers. That's not the sort of outfit you really want to be working for, however, though it's where you may end up starting out.

Another possibility was business English, Sara said. She'd taken a few business courses (though that wasn't her major, which was Computer Science). If you've got a business background - or computing, for that matter - make the most of it; there are jobs for which something more specific than just "TEFL" is being sought - but it still won't get you round the problem of not being an EU-citizen.

So, in the end, finding a job for many Americans is a question of either just getting lucky somehow (something which is true no matter what nationality you are), or else moving on from Spain. It's a shame, and our loss, that we Europeans are so sticky about citizenship, because Sara gives you the impression she's exactly the type of person you'd want in the classroom. In her case, of course, she could still find work, no problem, provided she remembers to flash that British passport, that is.

The CELTA course itself

They taught us the right way to analyse ourselves and see what worked and what didn't work.

As for the actual course itself, Sara certainly found it "intense", but thought it had "laid a really good foundation" for the future and felt that she was now a lot more confident about stepping into the classroom, now that she'd done CELTA. Obviously, after only a month's course, she said, some further in-house training in that first, elusive job would be useful to her (now that's the kind of outfit you want - one that believes in professional development!), but CELTA "taught us the right way to analyse ourselves and see what worked and what didn't work".

Barcelona, Sara had liked (it's close to the beach, for a kick-off), though she might not want to live here for more than a few years. Having lived in Austin - or "kind of outside", rather - she was amazed to see so many people walking down the Ramblas!