My 4 steps to becoming an online teacher as a medical student
By: Aya Smiai
Tags: Tips, Language Teaching, Side Hustle, Online Teaching, Life

My 4 steps to becoming an online teacher as a medical student Aya smiai Follow Jul 5 · 5 min read

Since high school, I have always tried to find a side hustle that meets my interests.

I have tons of interests and million things that I enjoy doing.

I like photography, books, literature, writing, cartoon, graphic design, animation, LANGUAGES….

And l almost tried to create a side hustle around each one of them😁.

#1

What I consider my first successful project was creating a YouTube channel and a Facebook page for animated book reviews.

But I’m such a lazy girl and I felt that creating one animated video took me forever.

Plus, I only had few views on my YouTube videos and I didn’t know how to promote myself and my content.

I almost uploaded 12 videos on my channel. Then, I gave up.

I always think about starting over on youtube but don’t know when the right moment will come.

#2

3 years later when I started my first year in med school and I hated my field of study.

Maybe you’re shocked who doesn’t like to be a doctor.

Well, I do! 🤷‍♀️😂

I thought maybe doing a side hustle around medicine will help me love it because at least all the anatomy, physiology, and histology will be useful at making me some money.

That’s what I thought😑

So the first dollars I made online were from writing and selling medical

articles on Fiverr and my brother bought the first four articles😂 .

I needed reviews to get clients and I needed clients to get reviews.

So I asked my brother for help and he supported me (actually he always does ) 😉.

When I had my reviews I got my first real client.

Unfortunately, that first experience was bad.

He didn’t like my article😏.

He said it’s not a good quality content.

I just replied saying. “ it’s a 5$ dollar article what are you expecting 😂.”

I’m happy he didn’t leave me a bad review at the end🤭.

I worked few months on Fiverr and I made around 120$.

But I hated this job because I was drowning in medical content.

So I hid my gigs, withdrew my money, and started looking for something else ….

#3

So here I’m searching again for online teaching opportunities.

I said again 😂 , because teaching online was always something that I tried to do but couldn’t get any dollar out of it.

Simply because I searched in the wrong place.

I thought my love for children and my relatively good English skills are enough to work for websites like VIP kids and Cambly.

But I was wrong 😑. I didn’t get accepted simply because I didn’t meet their requirements.

I also tried to teach in Italki.

But guess what my application was declined not only one time but 3 times or maybe more I not sure ( I have a bad memory and I always forget these details😅 ).

I applied to teach French as it’s my second language and I also tried Arabic my native language.

In the end, Nothing worked 😑.

#4

The next station was during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020.

When everything was closed in my country and we’re home 24/24h .

I thought It was the perfect time to start my research again.

And this is how I ended up in Preply. 🎉 .

I signed up to teach my native language Arabic and surprisingly in almost 4 days, I received my acceptance email.

I thought I was lucky because the website was hiring hundreds of new tutors.

Millions are locked in their homes and they’re trying to fill the huge amount of free time they have with multiple activities.

I set my price low at 5 $/hour just to find my first student.

In 7 days, I got my first trial lesson booked and I was so so excited about it.

I texted my new student to know more details and it turned out he’s the father and the lesson was for his 8-year-old and 11- year-old daughters.

He told me that they are bored at home ( just like me 😆) and that lockdown is a great opportunity for them to have fun and improve their Arabic writing and reading skills.

Suddenly, I started to freak out.

What I’m supposed to do during this trial lesson?

Where do I find materials that meet my students’ needs ?

I’m not a teacher and I don’t have any resources to use.

In this situation, any normal person will ask Teacher Google for help.

For sure he has millions of useful resources.

But I didn’t 🙂.

Instead, I went to the nearest book shop and I bought a 1 st grade Arabic school book, a small whiteboard, and 3 whiteboard pens black blue, and green, and here we go.

I started my lesson by asking them to introduce themselves and to speak about their hobbies and then we read a short text together.

During the lesson, I felt their mum’s presence in the room.

I didn’t see her directly on camera but I heard her whispering to her daughters some answers.

This stressed me a little bit but I tried my best to concentrate on my lesson.

When my trial class was done, I immediately received a notification that my student bought 10 HOURS with me😍, Yeey 🎊

This was my first milestone .

I increased my price to 7 $ and this is how I got my second student whom I still teach until now.

At that moment, I decided to never stop teaching.

The key message I wanted to deliver through this story is the importance of knocking on different doors.

Try as many opportunities as you can.

Surely, you’ll end up finding what suits you the most.

The greatest thing so far about online teaching is the amazing people I had the chance to meet, to help, to learn from, and to laugh with …

I’m grateful to you all.