About the Star
Lara is an adjunct English instructor teaching writing at UMass Lowell and several other colleges. Lara was born and raised in Ukraine, and she never thought that she would end up living in another country. She started studying English as a foreign language when she was 11. After the first week of English classes, Lara realized that she could teach English way better than her teacher, or any teacher for that matter. You see, Lara’s confidence in her abilities was and sometimes still is far ahead of her actual abilities (her confidence and her abilities do tend to catch up though). In her 20s, Lara moved to the U.S., sealing her faith to become an English instructor. Two Master’s and one Ph.D later, Lara started teaching college level writing, reading and ESL classes, first in Arizona (it's not a myth; those places do exist: it's always sunny and there is no snow unless you want to drive 20 minutes up to the mountains) and then in Massachusetts (where she relearned how to appreciate seemingly endless snow). Lara always suspected that dancing is a lot of fun, but her suspicions were fully confirmed when she took salsa classes. After her first class, Lara immediately considered herself Dancing With the Stars material. She was lucky enough to finally make somebody believe in this idea - UML fell for that. The “casting call” for Dancing With the UML Stars seemed like a perfect opportunity to meet new people, learn new moves, and, of course, establish herself as one of the Dancing Stars. Lara hoped, in vain, that knowing how to dance salsa would help her on DWTS: not so, she will be dancing foxtrot that has nothing to do with salsa and requires Lara to relearn everything she thought she knew about dancing. Lara hopes that dancing foxtrot will not be such a big flop and she won’t need to face the harsh truth about her dancing abilities. After all, far-fetched ideas often prove to be the most successful ones!
About her Partner
Andrew Kisielius is a graduate student in the Mathematics department. He learned to dance on the ballroom team at Tufts University, where he completed his BS in Computer Engineering in 2007. Andrew now teaches ballroom at Paper Moon in Merrimack, NH, and works full time at BAE Systems as an engineer..
Beginning Interview
This interview was taken during week 2 of 10 of Lara's preparation.