 History. History. History. This is the one institution anywhere in the UK, the one department anywhere in the UK, where students can explore a range of regions that basically make up three-fifths of the world's population. Taking Europe and North America or the Western world out of the centre of world history and bringing the rest of the world into the centre, what we enable our students to do is to think critically about global history. I chose to come to SOAS because it offered a more diverse course in comparison to the other universities I chosen. They were far less Eurocentric and they specialised in the areas of history and development that I wanted to study. At SOAS we do do a lot of history of Europe, of England and so on. Europe was quite influential in the 19th century, so we need to understand Europe if we're going to understand the world. But our focus is not on Europe, our focus is on what happened in Africa, and you know Middle East Asia, East Asia in my case. And because of that, no one places at the centre. So we get used to thinking in very flexible ways that if you want to understand how a modern economy develops or how a labour movement develops or how somewhere becomes a nation, you realise that you might know a lot about, in my case, Japan. So I can tell you a fabulous story about Japan, but maybe that isn't the case somewhere else. When I read the SOAS curriculum I was like, okay, wow, this is about Asia, it's about Middle East, it's about Africa. It was histories that would have been maybe one module in the other universities, but here it was the whole course. I did have other universities in mind, all great institutions, however SOAS spoke to me, the nature of the school itself, what it means, the expertise, the collection of expertise of Africa alone in one place. There is a concentration here of expertise that you will not find in any other departments in a higher education institution, any other university in the UK and arguably in Europe. We do know our stuff, we know a lot about Japan. We have two Japanese historians here, most places don't have one. We have four historians who work on Africa, different parts of Africa. Africa is one thing, but Africa is many different things. So you can go deep into a subject here in ways that I think are more difficult in other places. History especially, they are very specialist modules and areas of expertise and I've heard a lot about it from friends or family even online and just from lectures I've seen on the internet. Professors who were not in my field would stop me on the hallway and ask me, generally ask me what I was studying and generally had enthusiasm for me and they would tell me about their studies, hoping that maybe I could find some sort of correlation that would help benefit my studies. SOAS is a very intimate place, it's a small university and therefore our faculty and our teaching staff are very engaged in small group teaching. Like the rest of SOAS I have a very diverse set of colleagues, it's one of the great things about walking through the doors in the morning is nobody's in the majority, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. With the history department, like the lectures I've made friends with them, like that's how friendly it is and they're really open, they have really good open hours, you can just walk in and say hi to them, you see them walking around and they take a genuine interest in you and what you're passionate about. The students who do well here are students who are curious, they're not satisfied with what they know already, they're not satisfied with the history they've learnt already, they don't want to do Hitler again. We don't do Hitler and Stalin, some of them may but they'll do it from a different angle. Through debate, through engaged reading, through research and through close contact with their lecturers, students develop a broad range of intellectual and critical skills. Our students go into a whole range of professions. We get a lot of people who want to go into the public sector, you know I usually write at least two references for the foreign office every year for other state departments and things like that. NGO work, public sector work, voluntary organizations, things. A lot of history students, we learn how to write well in history, they want to be journalists. You can go on and go into law, you can go on and do a master's degree in a range of subjects. A history degree at SOAS is a great way of getting access to the UK foreign office, to the state departments in the US but also to a host of foreign ministries within the European Union. Given that we're SOAS, a lot of students here want to make a difference in the world and when they say the world they mean the world, they go everywhere. It's very difficult to keep track of them sometimes, we wish they'd keep in better touch sometimes. Also even the extracurricular stuff is really amazing, they have so many unions that they're really passionate societies around. SOAS has a great student life, you know, it's part of the history society and we did great things with great camaraderie, you know good extracurricular, just, you know, good people and good fun, you know, you, you know, we work hard here at SOAS, we learn a lot of SOAS but we also we have a good time while doing it.