I hope to form great relationships with the people around me, and I hope that by the time I get back to the United States I will know a lot more about the laws surrounding intellectual property, and how to market intellectual property effectively. My greatest fear at this point is that I don’t take advantage of this opportunity in the greatest way that I can. I want to be exhausted when I hop back on the plane, but feeling fulfilled and happy like I crossed over a barrier in my life.

I am most looking forward to working on projects with people. I think that working with people towards a goal is something that is very important and builds relationships, and it is all the more exciting that we are working on projects that we have high levels of interest in. I come from a liberal arts undergraduate college and was made to do a lot of things that I simply was not interested in. Though not everything in the module will be my favorite thing to do, everything will feel like it is valuable to my future in some way, which is something that I have waited my whole life for.

My first impressions of Birmingham have been good ones. Looking out at grand architectures like Old Joe, or just some of the chapels down the street from my accommodation make my heart almost leap out of my chest with life. I’m only twenty-two years old, but the differences in the things around me make me feel like I am experiencing an adventure for the first time in a long time. It’s like I am a child doing the most adult things that I have ever done at the same time. And I am stunned at the diversity of the people on the campus. Most of the people in my course are from China, I met a guy from Germany in creative writing society, and I met another girl from Palestine just outside of Aston Webb. Every single one of them have this exceptional desire to learn and to strive for who they want to be. It really is amazing to see how different we are, but also how similar.

I believe that the Digital Media and Creative Industries course at UoB gives me a greater opportunity to be successful in journalism and in freelance writing. I want to learn the ins and outs of marketing my work while also learning how to effectively sell intellectual property, or my stories whether those be the nonfiction journalism writing or the fictional freelance writing that I work on. I think that the modules will provide me with imperative skills for the future of the things that I want to do.
Another reason that I came to do postgraduate study had nothing to do with studying, but had everything to do with location. If I had stayed in the US, a lot of the information that I would need to write about would be things that I was familiar with. Coming to Birmingham is forcing me to learn what goes on in a different culture. Sure, it is the unsafe option to leave what I do know, but I believe that the unsafe and most well-rounded journalist is the most effective one. I think that staying in the United States would have limited me, and coming to Birmingham might make me.

I’m an international postgraduate student from the US. Often, I am asked about how I came to choose the University of Birmingham for my postgraduate study, which is a very reasonable question given that I picked a school in a different country. My answer always pertains to how I found out about the University through an athletic program, existing to give people the opportunity to continue their athletic careers after their undergraduate study, but I find that answer to be way too simple. My primary purpose of coming to UoB had nothing to do with me trying to chase some track and field dream. I could have done that in the US as a fifth year. I came to UoB because I wanted something new out of life. For the first twenty-two years of my life I lived around the Massachusetts area. That’s where I grew up, that’s where I went to school, and that’s where I would have stayed if I didn’t spread my wings. I always had the fallback plan of leaning on my parents for things in the US. I would always say to myself that they would take care of the difficult matters if the difficult matters seemed too hard for me to handle. However, that was always a fact that was killing me on the inside. I knew that the final part of my maturity would be to be able to consistently handle hard things on my own, and moving to Birmingham has so far forced me into doing that.
Since I left the US, and the crutch of my parents across the lake, I have already found that the responsibilities that I used to think would be extremely hard actually aren’t difficult at all. In two weeks in Birmingham I have learned how to cook chicken, pasta, and rice. I have learned the wonders of the stove top, making things like French toast, omelets, and grilled cheese. All of these things are so simple to make, yet they were things that I refused to even try to make for the first part of my life. I have learned where to look when I shop, which was an even harder challenge than learning how to shop in the US because a lot of the stores in the UK were unrecognizable when I first arrived. In retrospect, I have learned that the maintenance of my home and lifestyle are things that I have to control. My mother is no longer going to be there making dinner in the afternoon every day, and my father is no longer going to be there to fix the oven when it does something weird. I am the one who has to fix the problems, and though it is not a bad thing to receive help, at this point in my life I think there is a great value to learning on my own, which is why I chose to come to Birmingham for my postgraduate study.