At school, I was always quite shy and was constantly reminded of the old cliché that I ‘needed to come out of my shell’. When it came to applying to universities, my lack of confidence meant I really didn’t know what I wanted to study. I was torn between history, law, geography, and business management. A fairly broad range, I know, but like I said, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. As I was the first person in my immediate family to go to university, the decisions I had to make soon became so daunting that I got to a point where I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go at all. I was certain that I wanted to live independently while doing something that I loved, and after coming here, I soon realised that university offered me the chance to do just that.
If I was going to make a real decision, I knew I needed a starting point, and while it was never my best subject, my history lessons were always pretty interesting at school. So, I started looking at the courses across prospectuses, and I found myself unable to put them down. I had a moment of enlightenment I realised I could learn about whatever part of history I wanted to, and not just the classic Tudor and World War Two periods that my school had chosen from the national curriculum. Since freshers' week, I have explored an assortment of topics from across history, including the European witch craze, the progressive movement in 1920s America, and how history is used in video games today. If you love it, you can guarantee that you can study it somehow. University has enabled me to explore history for myself, making my own judgements and developments along the way.