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‘Told ’em I finished school and I started my own business / They say, “Oh you graduated?” / No, I decided I was finished.’
Kanye West, School Spirit
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Education is hugely valuable, and getting a place at university is a massive achievement. But too many ethnic minority students choose to apply because they feel they have to, or because they believe that if they don’t, they will have in some way failed. This means that many end up on campuses they aren’t quite suited to, studying subjects for the sake of it, unable to make university work for them. One of the biggest takeaways from this chapter should be that doing your research is crucial – not simply so that you learn what your potential uni can offer in the way of courses and facilities, but also that you know what its vibe and culture is. This way you will find out off the bat if it’s somewhere that would suit you, or somewhere you can at least get the most out of. You should explore all your options: in terms of the choice of degrees on offer, the establishments themselves, when you should go, and indeed whether you have to go at all, as that, too, is of course an option. Increasingly, not all vocations require you to have continued into higher education, or at least not full-time. If she had known what she knows now about how her career has turned out, Alexis believes she would have taken a different route:
‘I personally would’ve taken another year out. I would’ve tried to find myself, because when you come out of college, you still don’t actually know what you want to do with your life, you’re still quite young, you’re 18. Coming from an African background, there is a lot of pressure to go on to university as soon as you come out of college.
‘I would’ve done more work experience in that gap year and explored my options and seen what I really wanted to do, then decided to go to university and kill it. I’m back in university now, I went back to do a masters, I’m doing it in business, which makes sense, and I’m excelling. I got a first in my first semester and I never thought that I could ever achieve a first-class – I’ve never ever got an A in my life! It showed me that there’s too much pressure on students to go to university, get a load of debt for a course they have no interest in or that they might change their minds about later on in life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I realised what I was really passionate about, and it makes sense that I’m excelling in it because it’s what I want to do. I feel like people should just take their time, they shouldn’t feel pressured by society or their parents, even though it’s hard. Take your time and really explore what it is you really want to do. A lot of the time, you leave university after college and you still can’t get a job anyway because they tell you that you don’t have experience.
‘University is always going to be there, it doesn’t have to be done when you’re 18 and fresh out of college, when you have no idea what life is. The world has told you, you go to college and then you go to university and then you get a lot of debt – at least get into debt for something that you’re going to use!’
Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher at the Little, Brown imprint, Dialogue Books, didn’t go to university until she was 21, when she attended UCL to study Politics and Anthropology. Before then she had wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and had decided the best way of going about it was to get some work experience first, by working with production companies and becoming a runner. She had chosen her degree specifically, after three years out of education, and while she didn’t end up taking the career path she had initially thought she wanted, her course led her right back to her first love: books.
‘If I were doing it now, I would look at universities and colleges that offered part-time degrees to get the qualification,’ Sharmaine says. ‘More and more places are doing online degrees, and I would have done that in the evenings and at the weekends and then worked during the day. I just think that, you’re paying so much money now, and most people I know, when I talk to them about coming out of university, they actually don’t know what they want to do. I think higher education shouldn’t be about buying more time until you work it out, it should be about actually attaining: in Germany, you only go to university if you’re going to then do the job [which requires that specific degree], and your degree [trains you directly for] the job. Whereas here, you can go to university and study almost anything and then do something completely different. Idris Elba said that we as black people need to work ten times harder and we know that, so I always think, if you have something that stands out on your CV, people are going to raise an eyebrow and consider you over others if you take the same course as your white peers.’
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‘The minute black kids sit together in a cafeteria, white folks cry self-segregation. Never mind that white people have always sat together and always will.’
Dear White People
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While uni goes some way towards preparing you for the real world and a number of the hurdles you may come across there, it is still very much not reality. My university was nicknamed ‘the bubble’ and it had a campus magazine of the same name. I spent the vast majority of my time at university on campus making memories and mates, but as I will talk about later in ‘Black Girls Don’t Cry’, it was also quite an overwhelming time for me, as is it for many students. And like many students, especially black female students, I suffered in silence, hesitant to alert my faculty to ‘mitigating circumstances’ for fear of how I’d be viewed. When I eventually made the decision to take a year out, a bit of space and objectivity really helped me appreciate just how much I enjoyed university and how much I missed it. But it doesn’t have to be that drastic – you’d be surprised what a drink with your friends back home or just some home cooking every few weeks can do for the soul. Getting off campus and getting out a bit more is often a much-welcomed and much-needed break, as Afua advises:
‘I think, you need to get away, if only for your sanity, because there’s a bubble. It’s not the real world, a lot of people you encounter would never have met a black person in real life before and so you’re on the front line of that experience of having to explain yourself or your hair texture and all these things. I have never lost the heightened appreciation I have for London having been in Oxford, because just the fact that I’m fairly anonymous is such a relief that I still value. I think I was impressed by the new generation of students who feel able, collectively, to own things, name them, call them out, and I think that the fact that they’re a network helps them, so I think that’s really important.
‘I found doing mentoring work and helping other students really helpful because it gave me a sense of purpose. Even though I felt very ambivalent about being there, when I saw younger people coming through, it made me think, do I want it to be the same for them? Would I be happy with the conclusion that they don’t belong here? And that would make me say no, we have every right to be here, so whatever I can do to normalise it, it’s my duty. So, I think that sometimes it’s good to step outside of your own self, your own sense of suffering and your own preoccupation of what you’re going to do, and think about the bigger picture. You’re not just there for yourself, you’re there to try and stop other people from going through the same thing and I found that really helpful to pack into a sense of purpose.’
For many, the chance to make new friends is as much of a draw as the academic opportunities offered by university. Finding your tribe will not only help you to settle but it could also make the time you spend there more enjoyable. You might discover your friends on your course, in your halls and on general drunken university toilet run-ins. But if you find yourself feeling isolated culturally, there are increasing numbers of societies focused on identity – for example, my university had an African and Caribbean society, a Nigerian society and ‘This Is Africa’ – all of which held events that I attended with differing levels of enjoyment.
ACS and similar societies don’t always work for everyone, and some students struggle to find their place at university at all. For others, the idea of trying to find your tribe at uni is not a priority. But if that’s your choice, it’s still important that you have a group of friends to turn to, even if it’s off campus, to ensure you don’t become socially isolated. Some students choose to hang out with other students from local, more diverse universities, as well as locals who aren’t students. Others have friends from before university who they keep in touch with, or they travel back home often. You can choose to immerse yourself in campus life or to build or maintain a network outside of it – just make sure what you do works for you, and you don’t underestimate the importance of support networks during your time spent there.
‘I did make friends with other black people, and we sought each other out from other colleges and then we’d meet up and do stuff together,’ Afua tells us. ‘I felt like it created a bit of hostility with some of my college friends. They just couldn’t understand why I had to have friends outside of the college, even though it was quite obvious that we were all black, and so, there was just this awkwardness because they didn’t want to say, “Why are you hanging out with these black people?” They were like, “Why are you always doing stuff with other people?” I didn’t want to explain to them why I had a need to create a social group of black peers, so, it was just that awkwardness.
‘Having other friends – and they don’t have to be black friends – obviously I had white friends from all backgrounds. When I look at the people I’m still friends with, they’re not all people of colour, [but] what they all have in common is a slight sense of outsider-ness. So, whether it’s because of their class background or their religious heritage or whatever … just [those] that have not come from what they felt was like, the conventional background and having gone through those same types of questions. So, they’re not exclusive to race, I think obviously if you’ve got that visible difference, it’s heightened because it constantly manifests in all your interactions. So, surround yourself with people who can relate to you for whatever reason, or who you can relate to and who are supportive.’
Alexis also speaks about the importance of her friendships at university – many of which have continued several years later:
‘I didn’t find it difficult socialising at all. I think the best thing I learnt about Roehampton was my social experience; it being an independent space from home, paying my own bills, just being an adult and starting to live an adult life and living myself. Even in the first year, I didn’t live on campus, I lived with two guys in a house and everyone was like, “Aren’t you scared to live with two guys?” And I was like, “No,” and I thank God because the two guys, they were like my brothers. They literally were like brothers to me, it was a blessing … they looked after me and I looked after them. It was a really good experience, I met some really good people out there and most of the people I met are coming to my wedding; we kept our friendships.’
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‘The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.’
Timbuk 3, The Future’s So Bright
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The long and short of it is that everyone’s university experience will be different. Some people will end up going exactly where they wanted to go and then realise it’s not what they had expected; others will go to their backup choice and find that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. The most important thing is to arm yourself with knowledge: before you make any life-changing decisions, make sure they are informed ones. That information may lead you to take a completely different route in itself: university is full of opportunity, but so is the world.
‘To sum it up, don’t think of higher education as simply the next step after A-levels, think of higher education as a pathway into a career,’ says Sharmaine.
‘When you think about higher education as the pathway to your career, you think about it in terms of its practicality. When you are at university, if you do decide to go to university straight away, then make sure that there is a lot of time in between writing essays; in your second year, make sure that you are getting those placements. Don’t leave it to the university to do everything for you, actually think about it practically: what is it that I have to do to be better? Listen to your friends and then just think of ways that you can try to do things a little bit differently to stand out. Don’t be afraid to not follow the crowd, but do it in your own, subtle, private way. Don’t let people second-guess you, be like, “This is what I want to do,” and go and speak to people in the industries and write to people and ask them to mentor you or ask people who do that job. Find the experts.
‘My second thing is, be an expert. Be brilliant and bold and brave and know your industry inside out; know how it works and know the history and the culture, and just know it and breathe it and live it. I think that’s just so important, when you get to university, it’s not just about passing exams, it’s actually about learning. Really learning a skill or a trade or having an understanding of a topic or a subject, and so really take it on board. See it as an opportunity to have the time. It is all part of the process. I think what’s really important is that studying law or medicine to make your parents proud is a very different thing to actually studying it.’
Despite all the fuckeries and tomfoolery, university is still a brilliant place, where those who are lucky enough to go can find themselves, and so much more: lifelong friends, political views, endless knowledge and sometimes even a long-term partner. While there is still a long way to go in terms of diversity and inclusion, an increasingly self-assured and unapologetic student population is continuing to right wrongs at an unprecedented rate. I mentioned to a current Warwick student that there had been a slave auction during my time at uni and she told me ‘they wouldn’t dare’ host one these days – let alone a Django-themed one. I only attended four years before her. And as Alexis mentioned, the newfound freedom is particularly wonderful, for all students, sure, but more often specifically for black freshers who are sometimes still under a form of curfew for way longer than their white peers. The transition from having to barter and bargain with parents regarding nights out to simply going out whenever you please is just one of the many priceless things about uni, and in itself it is almost worth all the deadlines and all-nighters.
A culture shock can be just that – shocking – but it can also give you the opportunity to meet people and have experiences you would never have had otherwise. Like most things in life, it’s important to enter university aware, but also optimistic, as your future (as well as the future of these institutions) is set to get a great deal brighter.
WORK
‘We don’t need to get over a bar of excellence we didn’t create. Instead we have to create our own lane and our own version of success, our own version of good.’
Elizabeth
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‘We were bad, with very little of the boujee.’
Yomi
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