On leaving school, I had it all planned out – the business degree, the highflying job, the house, the car, the kids & the man of my dreams all by 25. That was the plan and that was how I saw things panning out. I was raring to go with my course, ready to learn about the inner workings of business; economics, accounting, management, enterprise – the lot. But the first thing I was going to learn at university and stepping out into the ‘real world’ was that life rarely goes to plan.

To cut a long story short, I found myself packing all my belongings back into the boxes they came from and I waved goodbye to Heriot-Watt University and my dream of being the female version of Lord Sugar. The days and months that followed were some of the hardest I’d experienced, essentially I felt like I’d failed myself and at that time, positivity and motivation were hard to come by. I knew I had to do something. I had so much potential, I had been the girl that was ‘going somewhere’ and I couldn’t let a minor bump in the road stop that. 

Prior to attending university, I’d travelled to Rwanda on a volunteering trip. It was hands down one of the best experiences of my life. My mind kept coming back to this, how much I enjoyed it, how alive it had meet me feel, the way really making a difference to the lives of others reminded me of the value of my own. The more I thought about it, the more my experiences spurred me on to become a teacher. Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”, I had seen this first hand in Rwanda and it opened me up to the idea of how rewarding a career in education could be.

So, I applied for university. I dedicated myself to getting rich experience in a variety of learning environments and as I progressed through my – very unintentional- gap year, it became clear to me that this was definitely what I wanted to be doing with my life. That year, from then to now sitting writing this blog post as a student of The University of Dundee, flew by. Summer 2015 saw me travel to Africa to volunteer as a teacher in Cape Town and it showed me the beauty of being an educator; while you are there to change the lives of others, it is highly likely that in turn they will in fact change yours.

As a teacher, I want to continue to travel the world, to work and learn in different cultures and to continually keep in mind that you can be the difference between a child achieving their full potential and not. I want to inspire a love of learning in all children, to motivate children to pursue a career that empowers them, to create learning environments that allow each child to engage. Most importantly, I want to be part of an education system that works towards promoting the positives of learning for each and every child, that allows each young person to reach their true potential. So now, the dream for me is to teach & continue to be taught all through my life. And for me, that’s a much better dream.