Hello all,
Ciku here, welcome to my blog!
If you are reading this, my guess is that you’re a prospective (probably Kenyan) student looking for that inside scoop into life at Surrey. Or, maybe you just had a random search on google and before you knew it you were 6 blogs deep in the inner workings of the surrey website reading about someone’s trip to Berlin over the summer holiday. Either way, you’re more than welcome.
My job here is to share my experiences with you, on every aspect of life at the University of Surrey and living as an international student in Guildford. I’ll do my best to try and relay that to you, and hopefully one day my long rant-y blog posts will convince you that Surrey is the place to be 😊.
As previously mentioned, my name is Ciku (officially Patricia but I go by Ciku) – born and bred in the beautiful city of Nairobi and now bustling around Baillie road. I am a second year Criminology student, which usually gets loads of ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ responses. With great reason, though! Criminology is an immensely interesting course – to me at least – and I love every bit of it. I mean don’t get me wrong when I have two 3000-word essays to do it doesn’t always seem like such a hoot, but, alas, this is university and it comes with the territory.
I graduated from Rusinga School in 2015, after which I took a gap year and joined Surrey in September 2016. I applied to the university through UCAS, assisted by the lovely people at Uniserv. I always get asked what made me pick Criminology for a degree, the truth is I just probably have a bit too much of an overactive imagination. Ever since I was little I always wanted to be a doctor, that then morphed into neurosurgeon, which then turned into forensic pathologist, and then forensic scientist, and, finally, when I got to A -Levels my love of psychology changed that into forensic psychologist. When looking around at universities, however, none of the Forensic psychology (or related) degrees quite grabbed my attention, or they were at universities I didn’t particularly want to go to. That’s when I discovered criminology and it’s been no turning back for me since then.
Finally, I know I’ve already ranted on for a little introduction post, but it would be amiss if I didn’t mention why I chose to come to Surrey. I always knew I wanted a campus university for the community feel, Surrey’s was a big draw for me because of the lovely grounds and the lake and the all-round prettiness of everything. Guildford is a lovely town – a lot bigger than I imagined, too -and I loved the quaintness of it but it also doesn’t hurt to be half an hour from London. Of all the Criminology courses I looked at, Surrey’s was the one I liked the best and it had by far the best employability! For the year that I was accepted into Surrey, graduate employability was at 95.6%. 95.6%. When you’re doing a degree as obscure as mine, 95.6% employability is an absolute sell. Got to plan ahead y’know. Plus, and I didn’t actually realise this till after I applied, but around 20% of Surrey students are international, which is a welcoming thought to know you’re not going to be the only foreigner running around wondering why it’s getting dark at 5pm 😊. All in all, there was loads of things that drew me to Surrey, which I will talk about more in-depth later on. For now, it’s goodbye – and congratulations to those who actually stuck around.
Rummage around this site for some more stories from international students just like me if you wish, and hopefully see you next time!
