Our people

Rachel Forisha

Rachel Forisha (’06) English Literature, Washington University
Taught English Addington High School
Now Analyst, Accenture

I’m Rachel Forisha and I joined Teach First in 2006 and now I work for Accenture the IT consulting company.

I’d just come off a summer of doing internships for law firms, and I had a flash forward into my life ten years in the future and I thought would I feel fulfilled with my life if I had just gone straight into a desk job sitting there every day dealing with contracts, because I was going to go into contract law.

But I decided no, I wouldn’t. I needed to actually have an impact and interact with people more. And the best people to interact with in my opinion are kids and to do that I thought I would be a teacher.

My experience was a little bit different because I had already done Teach for America. Joining Teach First I really felt that I was able to make a real impact. It’s a smaller organisation than Teach for America and they are on the cutting edge of trying to improve in any way they can in all processes. And for me that was just a really great way to take my experience from before and move it to the next level in a different country, in a different education system. I absolutely enjoyed it.

I’m most proud of the fact that I got email the other day from a former pupil of mine, and I send her one in reply but she wrote back to me and said “Miss Forisha, you know you can’t start a sentence with the word ‘and’ – you taught me that”.

And it is just having that relationship that still continued on – I haven’t taught her for four years now – but to have that email come through and have my own words coming back at me as an English teacher and knowing that the positive relationship is still there – that is what I am most proud of.