 I grew up in a lovely town or borough in London called Tower Hamlets, which was quite disadvantaged. Aspirations weren't really the currency of the day and higher education was always seen as something which you should aim for, aspire to, to try and lead a better life and my father was very insistent that all of his children do really well and he really drilled into us the notion of being educated, going into higher education, doing well and so it really was a part of the lexicon of life growing up. So Salas was something which I hadn't heard of when I was in college and then I came to a open day here and coming into the JCR I had in the summer previously gone and had two weeks at Cambridge and seen what it was like and Salas coming to Salas was like home and it was clearly a place where people felt comfortable, the diversity of people in the students union just walking around the place was incredible and it felt good and obviously on top of that it had a fantastic rating in the league tables it was really well placed in terms of its academic research and for my subject of economics and politics it was studying topics and subjects which are now the zeitgeist you know talking about Iran and the Middle East Africa when I was applying those things quite hadn't they hadn't quite become the topical countries that they are now so knowing that that was going to be the case that's why I chose to study at Salas. The first word that comes to mind having worked in higher education for quite a while is it's a unique experience I don't think there's any other university pretty much in the UK that could have given me the experience I had at Salas. I've just come back from holiday and it was through my Salas contact that I made that I was able to enjoy the fruits of Senegal and that would not have been possible without making the friends at Salas and actually I've been blessed to have travelled in to lots of places around the world and most of the places I go to I have friends and those friends are all from the melting pot that I saw us because it's an area studies university it's focusing on parts of the world that others perhaps don't it means people who come are eclectic they're diverse they're beautiful they speak five different languages it puts you to shame you know and being a child of immigrants to the UK I thought I was a little special and then you meet somebody who's got you know two thirds this one third that and that is what was really unique about coming to an institution like Salas it just felt like there was no homogeneous group that was the majority it was very much a melting pot of minorities and that was the majority and that's what makes it so unique and I hope it long continues. So at the moment I work for a Prince of Wales charity I work in corporate social responsibility which is a very Salas-y job because it enables me to save the world but also at the same time working in a corporate environment and the way Salas has helped me is it's shaped the way I see the world and it's allowed me to have lots of friends and lots of good contact and actually come into a place like Salas where you are able to experience diversity it enables you to I suppose be prepared for a world that is globalised it prepares you for a world that is interconnected so you know when you meet somebody you always have something to say to them it could be from an environment and when you work in commerce or in any field that is corporate related people from all parts of the world are usually involved and having something to say to them from that one weird experience you had in Salas Bar comes in very useful actually it's what I found so Salas has helped me in lots of ways that I know and I can already tell you that it's going to help me in lots of ways that I don't know even now and if you were to ask me in five years time how has Salas helped you I'm sure I'll have more to say. So the easiest thing to say would be come to Salas but actually in a very competitive higher education environment I would tell anybody first to take a step back and really question what it is that they're looking for from a degree because so many people have a degree and it's become quite easy to attain a degree and what makes Salas unique is that it's not just the degree it's a all-round experience you come to a place where you meet people from all over the world you learn about things which are very unique in the UK because Salas is an area studies university and it really enables you to see things in a different way and and I think it's if you're invested in yourself and you're invested in becoming a an employee a person a humanitarian a person in development that is going to be operating in an interconnected world so Salas is perhaps the place for you because it really is a place where you can come and get all of those experiences in in Russell Square which is very unique.