As a Fulbright language teaching assistant, rightly speaking Alina Boiko is not a professor. However, “Professor Boiko” is how many of her students address her, and Alina realizes she quite likes the sound of it.
Alina grew up in the Kharkiv State in Ukraine, before moving to Kyiv to study at the National Universtiy of Kyiv–Moyhla Academy, where she earned her BA. She studied there on a full scholarship, courtesy of high performance on an assessment of her academic skills, where her knowledge of Ukrainian language and literature gave her a real advantage. Alina was initially inspired by a tentative thought of becoming a tutor for Ukrainian teens, to help afford them the same opportunity she had been given. So at Kyiv–Moyhla she began studying Ukrainian Language and Literature, to one day teach those very subjects to young secondary students like her.
When she first began, her field of study was relatively niche. “It was not considered a prestigious field,” Alina explains. But as her education continued, that changed. Many more people are interested in learning the Ukrainian language and its literature, for some as a way of showing national pride. Alina’s study of Ukrainian Language and Literature is a philological one, having to do with their respective developments and the relationship between them and other cultures and languages. Alina completed several theses, one being a comparative study of Ukrainian immigrant literature and Chinese immigrant literature, and another being the phonetic deviations of those for whom Ukrainian is a second language.
When applying to be a Fulbright scholar, Alina was in just her third year of study. “Too young,” some of her peers would say, or “too inexperienced.” “You’ll never get it.”
But none of this dissuaded Alina. “You don’t have to have the whole road to take the first step,” she says, but “every step you take is leading you to something great.” She has immense gratitude for the professors and the faculty of Kyiv–Moyhla for believing in and supporting her throughout the Fulbright scholar application process, which took almost a year to complete. Her hard work and dedication paid off, and Alina was accepted to be a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the Univeristy of Notre Dame, scheduled to move abroad for a year, just months after she graduated from Kyiv–Moyhla.
Alina has just been in South Bend for four weeks, but already she is filled with gratitude and hope. Alina has a great respect for every student she has who wants to learn Ukrainian. “It’s hard; it’s humbling,” Alina says. She studied abroad at the University of Toronto for a semester while at Kyiv–Moyhla, and recalls having real difficulties with her English. She relied on her community of other students from Kyiv–Moyhla, but that also made it easier to limit the English she spoke to classtime.
“It was a lot of hard work,” Alina says, to get where she is with the English language now. “A foreign language, with different letters…it’s inherently outside your comfort zone.” Grateful that there are people who ventured into her one-credit language course, Alina is also proud to share that next semester Notre Dame will offer a full beginning language course for Ukrainian – three-credits and applicable to language requirements and such. Alina is excited, and hopes more people take the leap and join her to learn Ukrainian “from the beginning.”
Alina has been sharing her own story for nine years through her Study Blog, which has documented her life’s trajectory in Ukrainian since she was in the 8th grade. Her readers, knowing her from a school-girl age, are just as thrilled as Alina at the honorary title of “Professor Boiko.” When asked about her future goals, Alina is thinking about further education, to better determine what she likes and doesn’t like and figure out where she wants to be. But she reminds us, her readers today, that although her Study Blog shows a straight path from the 14-year-old in her own hometown to a language teacher in a new country, at no point on that road did that girl know where she was headed. “We do not know what will happen tomorrow,” Alina says, but we don’t need to. Her dream of tutoring Ukrainian teens has certainly evolved and expanded. Alina will definitely become “Professor Boiko” for real someday, dedicated to educational and Ukrainian studies. Wherever she goes, she’s headed somewhere great.
About the CSLC
The Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures (CSLC) aims to support language learners at ND by facilitating meaningful experiences with linguistic acquisition and exchange - both in our campus community and abroad. We believe that access to the world's languages and cultures allows us to seek out new perspectives, to value the diversity of the world's cultures, and to embody global citizenship.
Originally published by at cslc.nd.edu on September 23, 2025.