I will be totally honest, I wasn’t exactly a model student back in Italy, in fact, I graduated with 63 out of 100, so I came to the University of Westminster expecting to fail, or at best just merely get by. The main reason why I took this important life choice in the first place was that I wanted to try a new experience, and at worst learn something new and have another story to tell. It is now three years later, and I am about to graduate with either a 1st or a close 2:1 grade.
Over these three years, I have perfected three languages, obviously English and Spanish, but also French. I can also speak conversational German. I studied and learned French and German on the University’s Polylang program offer, which gives students an optional module opportunity to learn another language at beginner, intermediate or advanced levels. With these four extra foreign languages, I can now converse all night long with tourists visiting my town back in Italy.
I have also benefited from plenty of professional experiences that will open lots of career doors in the near future (I will talk more about this in future posts). As a preview, one good example was representing my University on an in-person visit to the Department for Education and meeting the Member of Parliament (William James Quince). This proved all my past doubters wrong, including former teachers who referred to me as “dumb” and “hopeless”. I would attribute this total change to the totally different British education system, and to all my amazing teachers at Westminster who incited me to develop the skills that I didn’t even know I had before starting my studies here. I won’t sugar-coat it, personally, I really didn’t like the Italian system: It’s very theoretical, it encourages a system of servility from the students towards their teachers, and doesn’t teach individuals how to be human beings with their own critical sense. I feel it only teaches how to absorb knowledge without truly reflecting on it to really learn something.