Day #1 Hi, my name is Roberta and I'm from Brazil. I've just joined italki because I'm currently preparing to take a TOEFL test and I wish to practice my writing skills. I've been studying English more/less frequently throughout my life. In primary school I've studied on a constructivist school, in which one of the principals was an bilingual education. I think that was very important on my English learning development, once I've have been in contact with the language since a very early age. Growing up I was not able to take English classes on specialized courses such as "CCAA", "Brasas" and "Wizard" due to the very high costs of these courses. Instead, I started to expand my vocabulary by listening to my favorite American artists (and reading the translation of the lyrics) and watching TV shows such as Friends and The X Files. Later on, by the time I was finishing High School, I became very interested in International Relations and ended up choosing this field as a career. In college, one of the great challenges I've had was reading academic texts in other languages such as English and Spanish. There were a few texts in French, but for these I've always had a little help from my college friends. Other challenge that was specially difficult to overcome was my insecurity. In college, most of my colleagues came from very prestigious schools and have had the opportunity to attend courses like "Wizard" and "Cultura Inglesa" and they've had such an incredible set of skills! However, on the end of the day they had the same insecurities that I had and we were always helping each other during college. After graduation I started working at the National Academy of Medicine of Brazil as a Project Assistant. Here on the Academy, I have the opportunity to work with people from different countries and we are always working towards international cooperation on Health. Now that I'm preparing myself to enroll on a postgraduate course, I think I need to take my English skills to the next level and I will use all the tools that I can find to make this dream possible.