Emms Family Award

Transcription

So I remember meeting one of the pirate leaders and I introduced myself to him and I said, I would like to interview you. I would like to find out why are you doing what you're doing and what you are trying to achieve, and initially he said to me, no, no, you cannot do that. You have to leave this village and I said to him, no I'm not going to leave. It's about determination, it's about being persistent I think and this is one of the things we learnt at Kingston University. It's about being persistent and not giving up easily and I could have given up and left, but I said no, I will have to find someone. When I started Kingston in 2005, my English wasn't that good to be honest. I couldn't write a proper sentence and when I came here I'm sure the lecturers were thinking, he's probably too ambitious. But the great thing was that they gave us additional English support. I was nervous and when I, I remember when I sat in the class; I think I was one of two mature students, so most of the students were young. I questioned myself and I thought, this is probably not the right place to be in, because I was older than these guys, but you felt like being part of a family, very quickly. The first year you learn very much everything. You learn how to develop stories, how to come up, what good stories look like, how to research, how to develop, how to interview people, how to write. So you learn the whole process of news making if you like. Kingston University is inclusive, it's for everybody, it's not a university for a particular, people from a particular background. Everybody, I'm sure was thinking, he's probably too ambitious and he cannot, let alone become a journalist, he cannot finish the first year, and as I said, at the end of my second year I was working with Channel 4 News, thanks to Kingston University.