I'm Agnes and I'm in third year maths.
I was born in Poland and I moved to the UK when I was about 11.
Since then, I grew up in the suburbs of West London.
I went to a small Catholic school
and then I ended up in Nottingham.
Finding a university
that attracted me and actually made me excited
about going to university was really important.
and I found that when I visited Nottingham, I could really kind of
imagine myself here and imagine building a life here throughout university.
And I think it was the city in the end that kind of won me over.
I think it's really cute and charming and
I don't know... it's just full of culture and art and I just love it.
The thing that comes to mind the most
is that coming to open days and going around universities
everything seems so big and scary, especially here on campus
it felt like it was like a maze, that you had to figure out how to navigate.
And now a couple of years in it's just like
I know it like the back of my hand and turns out that everybody knows each other.
And suddenly I'm making friends here and there and everybody's connected.
And it's just all like a big community.
I think it's the sense of community and kind of a sense of belonging
that I feel being a student at the university in Nottingham.
I find that I can approach
any kind of staff member or kind of student sitting about, and
if they look friendly enough, they'll be friendly and there's no
kind of fear of I don't know, I don't feel
isolated or necessarily alone.
Like it feels very much like there's a friend waiting around every corner
I find that in maths it's very
adaptable to what you're interested in
and what your career aspirations are.
So after the first year, really, you can just choose whatever modules
kind of suit you and decide not to do the ones that you don't like very much.
And at the point where you kind of reach third and fourth year
every person on your course feels like they've done a different degree, which
feels really strange because at that point, keeping course
mates is weird
because you don't have people to go to the lectures
with because all of your friends are in different lectures.
But it also feels really interesting because it's very like
almost interdisciplinary.
Like if you...
if you're struggling on a problem, your friend might come with a completely
different perspective because they've done a complete different side of the degree
and it feels really collaborative, I really like that as well.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this
and I feel like I've got it almost figured out
I think I want to work in a research environment
because I like the idea of like the autonomy behind it
and I want to work with kind of things that I'm passionate about.
So I really like the idea of working in
like environment conservation.
So I guess my idea for the future is just being like the token mathematician
on like, a team of zoologists or biologists and helping them with the little stats.
Initially I had almost like a eureka moment of like I'm passionate
about this and I'm doing my degree that I actually really love.
Why can't I just join them?
And once I figured out that I want to do something that involves
environmentalism, but apply my skills in maths to it
I started looking around for, OK, who can help me figure out what that means?
And my first point of call was to my personal tutor
and he suggested I speak to the career service.
He also pointed me towards, like there was a project
a couple of years back... I don't remember what it exactly stood for
but it was like maths and it was like mathematicians
working on like
issues
I think it was maths and biology joint
and they had some like environmental stuff in there, it was a PhD program.
So he, like, put me in contact with a PhD student
that I had a call with
and he was really encouraging and he helped me figure out, as well
like how did he get there and how is he finding the
kind of, research side of things in that area.