Why I Chose to Go to University
Life at home when I used to live with my parents/guardian was very turbulent. I used to study a lot in high school, dreaming of my escape ticket to uni one day and moving somewhere far far away. I was so ambitious with where I wanted to study, wanting to move to the other side of the world…..’anywhere but this “hell hole” UK’ I used to think to myself. Going to university was no easy task for me however – the constant trauma I got from staying where I used to live made me more depressed each day and eventually, I reached a breaking point where I couldn’t study for my A-levels at all. I would come back from college and just try to force myself to go to sleep to escape life, I wasn’t able to be mentally present in lessons either. It got to a point where I would stop attending college at all as I had no energy to get out of my bed. I dropped out of college twice… due to depression and due to becoming estranged and therefore having to work full time to pay my bills instead of remaining in full-time education.
I did persevere though – one Summer I worked in an Amazon warehouse for a whole season and saved up the money to afford a whole year of cheap private student accommodation next to my college and had some money left over for food which was supplemented by Universal Credit. I ended up doing my A-level exams that year and getting into University of Manchester to study Computer Science. It took me 4 years to finish my A-levels! I could have just given up, dropped out of college and never come back, but I knew I could never let my circumstances get in the way of my future as I knew deep inside, I was capable of much more.
Living in the UK is now a blissful experience for me, I enjoy living in Manchester and it doesn’t seem like a “hell hole" anymore …. It feels like my home because the problem was never the country or the cities I lived in…It was the people who surrounded me.
Never give up.
Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash