The Student Success Endowment: Princess

My name is Princess, and I am a first year BA Sociology student here at NTU. Attending university for me means gaining new experiences, new perspectives and getting the possibility to immerse myself in many new activities. It also means being independent, learning to live on my own, and meeting like-minded people through the activities that I choose to take part in.

I was motivated to go to university after studying A-level sociology left me with a desire to want to know more, leading me to my degree choice. Neither of my parents went to university, but I have always had the aspiration to enter higher education.

In addition to my degree, I hope to gain some new perspectives on life, since being at university allows me to mix with different people who I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet otherwise. I really enjoy going to debate society as it gives me the opportunity to debate all sorts of topics with people who have different attitudes, backgrounds and beliefs to mine.

Growing up I was a dancer, and I have always enjoyed creative and performing arts. However, I ran into financial barriers when I started getting into dance seriously at the age of 14. Dance classes were quite expensive, and I got a part time job to help pay for the cost of dance classes, competitions, costumes, and everything else.

Like I say, I have always enjoyed the creative and performing arts, and this bursary has allowed me to discover a whole new outlet in the world of music. The money from the SSE helped me to pay for singing and guitar lessons here at NTU. Music has become a refuge for me and whenever I am stressed or overwhelmed, I can just grab my guitar and sing songs with it.

This has helped my personal development and enabled me to express myself creatively. Exploring music has also exposed me to a new world of cultural history, as every song usually has its own background and history, which helps me appreciate other cultures even more.

Since I was a complete beginner at both singing and guitar, this experience has helped me develop patience and perseverance, because improvement came slowly and with constant practice. I believe these skills will help me in many different aspects of life, from doing well and successfully graduating from my degree, to hopefully being able to work abroad for a couple of years after university, which is a big goal of mine.

Music has helped me so much over my first year of university so far, that I look forward to continuing to pursue this hobby and learning new instruments with further bursary instalments. To anyone who has donated to support the Student Success Endowment, I would like to say a massive thankyou for helping me to find a new passion and develop personally and professionally, and to anyone considering making a donation, I would really encourage you to do so in order to keep helping more students like me.