Clarifying your goals

In Iran the project I was working on with my lecturer was kind of like a PhD project. That was going to be my first choice, working in my field, in aquaculture. But during this project some events happened to me and so I had to flee the country and come to the UK.

I was a BSc graduate when I came here and NARIC accepted it as equivalent to a UK degree. When I came to the UK, mostly because I had a kind of bad experience in my career, I wasn’t happy to go back and do any kind of work in my degree subject, in my field. So I decided to change my career and I started from scratch.

I went to college and was studying ESOL and HNC computing. Bridges helped me with some subjects. They helped me to find some subjects at The Open University. I was doing some of their units such as Learning to change and Starting with maths. I studied these during my study at college on ESOL and HNC computing. I had lots of problems – personal problems, language, finance and other things – but I got good marks.

I started studying HND in 2010/11. I finished the HND and I started university last year. My best subject was Computing HNC, then I changed to software development and now I study electronic and digital system engineering.

I am going to do third year and after that Bridges is going to find me a work placement. They already helped me a bit, helped me with the finance and applying for SAAS. This year Bridges found me a security job with G4S for the summer holidays, so I did it and I finished it last week.

The best point was entering into university, proving to myself I could do it when there were lots of barriers. My long-term goal is, after getting experience working, maybe I could have my own software company. Maybe after working for a few years I will just study again, start studying for a masters or PhD. It depends on the situation. At the moment I think mostly being a graduate and finding a job is important. I am trying my best.

I moved from my hometown in south-east Poland to Warsaw when I was 18, to go to university. I always liked travelling and photography. It all fits to geology as well. I studied geology there for five years and I got a masters degree. My specialisation was in mineralogy, especially gemology, jewellery stones, that kind of stuff, which is quite difficult to get into, as you can imagine. It’s a very small field, especially with no experience at all.  

Then I started working, not in that field at all but with a Polish humanitarian organisation. I actually started volunteering for them when I was still a student. I was a Polish teacher for refugees. I was 26 when I came to Glasgow for the first time, when I was still working for the Polish organisation. After I finished that particular project that I was working on at the time, I moved to Glasgow hoping that it would be really easy to get a similar job here.

I did a course in Spanish in the evenings, so when I was there I got the proper prospectus for the full-time courses. I looked at what was available, at what was quite similar to what I had done back home so that I could get to masters straight away.

I preferred the course here. It was much more practical. This was a course that prepared you to work. It was the right course – it was called ‘in partnership with industry’, so that says a little bit about it. It will prepare you to work in the industry. At uni when it got quite tough with coursework and work at the same time, I kept working because I had to.

I could have gone back to uni a little bit earlier, but not that much, to be honest, because to study here, I had to be – in my case at least, as a part of the European Union – to be treated as a home student, you have to be here for three years. It went pretty smooth from the moment I decided to go back to uni. I think that was the best decision I ever made.