Blogs

I joined the doctoral programme at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology in 2013. I came to know about UNMC from an alumnus, Dr Mahek Sharma of the BMB department. I was interested in pursuing my doctoral degree in a medical centre, and UNMC seemed to be the perfect fit for me.

Some celebrities have always taken an active interest in the education of their fans by setting up foundations and scholarships to fund university tuition fees. However, a new trend has emerged: fuelled by the connection between celebrities and fans on social media, young people have been directly asking their idols to contribute one-off payments towards their college costs.

More than half of the world’s population uses the internet and social media users have increased by 21 per cent since 2015, with 2.8 billion users reported globally in 2017.

When trying to understand the potential influence of individual universities for the general election we decided to take into account several factors: the student population by constituency in the 2011 Census, the number of UK students in a university, the location of university campuses, and how close the result of the 2015 general election was.

I was eager to make the best of an exchange semester in France by integrating myself into the Toulousain lifestyle. My exchange college was the Institut national des sciences appliquées de Toulouse (part of the Federal University of Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées).

My journey to the American University of Sharjah (AUS) was a complicated one. 

During the semester before studying abroad, I took a choir class with a professor who previously taught at AUS and worked with a choir he created in the UAE. I made friends in that exchange, over Skype, who studied at AUS, and who ultimately convinced me to come here.

Coming to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 2012, after graduating from high school in Toronto, Canada, was my first time coming to Europe. I never thought that I would find a place as culturally diverse as Toronto, but I was proven wrong when I came to RCSI.

I found out that I was pregnant during Freshers' Week. My mind often flits to that moment, the two pink lines and my shock and exhilaration. Like many undergraduates, I came to the University of Oxford with a dread of inadequacy. Now, my body was doing something wonderful, driving me towards a point that fear could not prevent.

When I told my friends that I was going to study industrial engineering in Karlsruhe, many asked me why. The city, with a population of 300,000, is unremarkable in comparison with its neighbours Freiburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, but is the location of one of Europe’s largest research institutions.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has achieved an excellent reputation in science and engineering because of some of the major inventions it has pioneered. 

Six months have gone by and I am still surviving in a foreign country, trying to make family, fellow citizens and my sponsor back at home proud. The idea of studying overseas is extremely appealing to many, and the Netherlands is a student-friendly country with an environment that enables you to adapt quickly and remain on your feet, despite the many challenges you may come across.