How my time at Leeds Beckett has benefited me

This is my last year of university and I’m silently hoping it won’t fly by as fast as the first two have. I love being a student at Beckett, in part because I am a very academic person who’s always enjoyed school, but also because I sometimes look back at who I was when I first moved to Leeds and can’t believe how much I’ve grown.

My personal journey

First-year me was shy, socially anxious and ready to hide in the darkest corner of a lecture theatre to avoid interacting with others. At the start my course was confusing and felt alien to me. It made me doubt myself and my choices and I started to feel silly for getting into something I had no real idea about. Fast-forward two years, and here I am. I’ve found the perfect career choice in my field of study, I’m keeping up with my course requirements and I’m socialising and working well with my course mates with little hesitation. It is an exciting, rewarding and transforming experience.

Making and achieving new goals

University is a learning experience but is not limited to studying. It has taught me more about myself than I’d ever hoped to figure out this early in my life. It’s given me strength and showed me that I can achieve so much more than I’d thought realistically possible. Being a student has thrown me into a foreign country and environment, pushed me to adapt to various social situations, make friends, choose my career goals and create a clear picture of what I want my future to look like.

Student life is a self-discovery journey, created inside a safe, supportive environment where you can easily fail or make mistakes, without any judgement. If someone had told me that by the age of 22, I would find my dream professional goal, learn such valuable skills like shorthand, TV presenting or producing broadcast shows, I would have laughed in their face. But now I’m here, having done all that and more. Every time I learn a new skill here or try a new experience, I’m moving closer to becoming a graduate who has a fully formed idea about where to go once I leave the protective university environment.

Finding my path

Leeds Beckett has helped ease me into the working world, get a taste for the job market and has expanded my goals and skills. Without experiencing student life and university I would have struggled to find a clear route through life. Where I come from, it’s not part of our culture to find work from a young age. I got my first job at 20 years old, while a lot of my colleagues were as young as 16. This is why for me personally, it would have been a disaster to try and build my life straight out of high school. Going to university was always the right choice, since it allowed me to become so much more mature and confident.

I’ve gone from being someone who barely knew how to build a CV, to someone who is now successfully juggling a part-time job, freelancing, studies and working towards a visible goal. From a person who could barely start a conversation to a person who constantly asks strangers for interviews and is actively involved in communities of journalists and freelancers. I love being a student and I’d love for it to last a little longer. Without coming to Leeds Beckett, I would never have been this ready for the next stage in life.