‘The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.’
Timbuk 3, The Future’s So Bright
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The long and short of it is that everyone’s university experience will be different. Some people will end up going exactly where they wanted to go and then realise it’s not what they had expected; others will go to their backup choice and find that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. The most important thing is to arm yourself with knowledge: before you make any life-changing decisions, make sure they are informed ones. That information may lead you to take a completely different route in itself: university is full of opportunity, but so is the world.
‘To sum it up, don’t think of higher education as simply the next step after A-levels, think of higher education as a pathway into a career,’ says Sharmaine.
‘When you think about higher education as the pathway to your career, you think about it in terms of its practicality. When you are at university, if you do decide to go to university straight away, then make sure that there is a lot of time in between writing essays; in your second year, make sure that you are getting those placements. Don’t leave it to the university to do everything for you, actually think about it practically: what is it that I have to do to be better? Listen to your friends and then just think of ways that you can try to do things a little bit differently to stand out. Don’t be afraid to not follow the crowd, but do it in your own, subtle, private way. Don’t let people second-guess you, be like, “This is what I want to do,” and go and speak to people in the industries and write to people and ask them to mentor you or ask people who do that job. Find the experts.
‘My second thing is, be an expert. Be brilliant and bold and brave and know your industry inside out; know how it works and know the history and the culture, and just know it and breathe it and live it. I think that’s just so important, when you get to university, it’s not just about passing exams, it’s actually about learning. Really learning a skill or a trade or having an understanding of a topic or a subject, and so really take it on board. See it as an opportunity to have the time. It is all part of the process. I think what’s really important is that studying law or medicine to make your parents proud is a very different thing to actually studying it.’
Despite all the fuckeries and tomfoolery, university is still a brilliant place, where those who are lucky enough to go can find themselves, and so much more: lifelong friends, political views, endless knowledge and sometimes even a long-term partner. While there is still a long way to go in terms of diversity and inclusion, an increasingly self-assured and unapologetic student population is continuing to right wrongs at an unprecedented rate. I mentioned to a current Warwick student that there had been a slave auction during my time at uni and she told me ‘they wouldn’t dare’ host one these days – let alone a Django-themed one. I only attended four years before her. And as Alexis mentioned, the newfound freedom is particularly wonderful, for all students, sure, but more often specifically for black freshers who are sometimes still under a form of curfew for way longer than their white peers. The transition from having to barter and bargain with parents regarding nights out to simply going out whenever you please is just one of the many priceless things about uni, and in itself it is almost worth all the deadlines and all-nighters.
A culture shock can be just that – shocking – but it can also give you the opportunity to meet people and have experiences you would never have had otherwise. Like most things in life, it’s important to enter university aware, but also optimistic, as your future (as well as the future of these institutions) is set to get a great deal brighter.
‘We don’t need to get over a bar of excellence we didn’t create. Instead we have to create our own lane and our own version of success, our own version of good.’
Elizabeth
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‘We were bad, with very little of the boujee.’
Yomi
Work Twice as Hard to Get Half as Good
ELIZABETH
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‘I’m not just black, I’m a woman, so there are two glass ceilings I have to break every time I open my mouth. But if I wake up in the morning and think, “Oh my God, I got two ceilings I’ve got to smash today,” that’s no way to live.’1
Destiny Ekaragha
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‘Did the student who the teacher gave an A have two heads?’ my dad asked disappointedly as we were driving back from my Year 8 parents’ evening. Growing up in a Nigerian household, I was accustomed to these rhetorical questions. This particular one was further evidence that, one, my dad could exaggerate for England; and two, yet again I had fallen short of meeting his expectations when it came to my grades.
‘You have to be twice as good as them’ was something that was implied in everything I did or – according to my dad – couldn’t do. As discussed earlier in the chapter ‘Lawyer, Doctor, Engineer’, the importance of excelling at school knew no bounds. You could get 98 per cent in an exam and your parents would ask, ‘What happened to the other 2 per cent?’ You would then get 100 per cent in the next exam and you’d be asked why you weren’t studying law like your cousin; and eventually you would apply to university and they’d want to know why you didn’t apply to Oxford, as Warwick was good, but it wasn’t quite the most prestigious. Lessons on racism were intrinsically linked to work ethic. You work hard, you get good grades, so you don’t give them an excuse to treat you any differently.
Alongside feeling irritated and thinking they were overreacting half the time, I had some sympathy for my parents’ attitude. They knew I would be judged more harshly than my white friends on certain occasions and that, whether I wanted to be a lawyer or run my own business, meeting the minimum standard would, at times, just not be enough. When former First Lady Michelle Obama gave her version of the ‘Twice as good’ speech in 2015 to Tuskegee University, a historically black university, she said a version of the thing all black parents say to remind you that life will be more difficult for you than for your white friends: ‘The road ahead is not going to be easy. It never is, especially for folks like you and me. Because while we’ve come so far, the truth is that those age-old problems are stubborn and they haven’t fully gone away … So there will be times when you feel like folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are.’2
Unfortunately, those old-age problems haven’t gone away, and discrimination rears its ugly head, both before we enter the workplace and then while we make strides to progress within it. It can often leave us feeling that we have to work twice as hard only to get half as good back. This can make for a tough existence as a black woman. When you enter white spaces you find yourself trying to figure out: will this qualification be enough? Will my South London twang give me away? Or are they simply plain old racists and I’ll never get my just rewards no matter how ‘twice as good’ I am?
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‘Luck has nothing to do with it, because I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.’