Before university, before writing my first line of production code, I spent ten months at the Ukrainian Leadership Academy in Poltava — a gap-year program that shaped how I think, lead, and show up.
What Is ULA
The Ukrainian Leadership Academy (Українська Академія Лідерства) is a tuition-free, fully residential program for young Ukrainians aged 16–20. Founded in 2015, it runs campuses across Ukraine — Kyiv, Lviv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and more. The mission is simple: build a generation of responsible leaders who can drive real change in the country.
Admission is competitive — three stages of selection from thousands of applicants. The program runs September through June, six days a week, morning to evening. It's intense by design.
My Year in Poltava
I joined the 2019–2020 cohort at the Poltava campus. Around 40 of us from all over Ukraine lived and studied together for ten months. The daily schedule covered three pillars:
- Intellectual — lectures on history, culture, critical thinking, social analysis, and career exploration
- Physical — daily sports and physical training, no exceptions
- Emotional — mentorship, self-discovery, and values-based personal development
Beyond classes, we ran community projects, volunteered weekly — helping veterans, IDPs, and improving local infrastructure — and organized Impact Days, campus-wide events open to the Poltava community.
What I Took Away
ULA didn't teach me to code. It taught me things that are harder to learn from a textbook:
- How to lead a team when there's no clear authority
- How to think critically about the world around you
- How to commit to something bigger than yourself
- How to live and work with people who think completely differently
These skills turned out to be just as valuable in tech as they are anywhere else. Leading a dev team at Movadex years later, I kept falling back on things I learned in that Poltava campus — how to listen, how to give feedback, how to keep people motivated when things get hard.
What Came Next
After graduating from ULA in June 2020, I enrolled in Computer Science at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. The academy gave me clarity about what I wanted to build and the discipline to actually follow through. Everything that came after — the degree, the career, this site — started there.