It has been a while since I got on that flight, ushering in Aidil Fitri somewhere over the Middle East, bound for a city I had only read about in a prospectus. Looking back at it now, from this distance, the Chevening year sits differently than it did when I was living it week by week.
At the time I was a telco professional with a passion for new media, and I remember the exact line I used in my personal statement, about wanting to understand how the internet was reshaping the way we live and work, and about a shortage of that kind of thinking back home. That was the pitch, but there was also a quieter deadline behind it. I had set myself a target of finishing a Masters before I turned 40, and Chevening was the route that made the timing work. Leicester’s MA in New Media and Society fit the brief well enough that I built a year around it, right from the send off at the airport.
By the time I left for Chevening, London itself was not exactly unfamiliar. I had already been there several times, both as a diplomat and on personal trips, so this was not a first encounter with Britain. What was new was living there rather than visiting, and living as a student in Leicester specifically, a city I had never had reason to see before.
The landing still had its own weight to it. Heathrow, a British Council rep holding a card with my name on it, then hours waiting as students bound for Leicester kept arriving, well over a hundred of us by the time the coaches left. Somewhere in that induction week waiting around, friendships started that outlasted the year itself.
Opal Court became home faster than I expected. It helped that my flatmates were as far from home as I was, Taiwan, Cyprus, India, China, all of us figuring out kettles and heating and what “self catered” actually meant in practice. A postgraduate flat is a quiet flat, which suited me fine when deadlines came round, though the freshers’ cultural night made sure we weren’t strangers for long. At 39, I was easily the oldest in my cohort, older than most of my lecturers and tutors, which took some getting used to.
What I remember most is how much of that year was built by other people showing up. The Nottingham reception, where the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and British Council put faces to the emails, and where I ended up in a focus group giving feedback on the Chevening website of all things. The Diwali celebrations, which in Leicester are not a footnote, they are the city’s biggest night. Raya gatherings organised by Bruneian students scattered across the UK, because homesickness finds you fastest during the first big celebration away, something that carried through into National Day celebrations months later too.
By February we had formed BRULeics, the Brunei students’ society in Leicester. It started as a pot luck dinner and some minutes someone volunteered to write up. Small thing, but it meant there was now a structure for the Bruneians coming up behind us, which felt like the point of the whole exercise.
There is a part of that year I never put on this blog, and it deserves a place here now. Earlier in the year my father was diagnosed with an illness, and trying to keep up with coursework with that hanging over me took a real toll on my focus, whatever a quiet trip home over the winter break might have suggested at the time. In April 2010 he passed away, and I found myself trying to get home on an emergency flight right when the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud grounded most of British airspace, so what should have been an urgent dash back took days longer than it had any right to. It remains one of the harder things I have lived through, and the coursework that came after feels almost incidental next to it. When I did eventually graduate, that degree was dedicated entirely to him.
By the time I was back in Brunei for good, the British High Commission was already thinking about how to capture stories like mine. I ended up working with them on a digital scrapbook project for Bruneian students in the UK, which felt like a natural next step. The scholarship does not really end when the flight lands home, it turns into something else, a network, an alumni body, a habit of paying attention to the students coming after you.
Chevening Alumni Brunei exists today because a lot of people from that same era decided the connections were worth keeping formal, the current executive committee still carrying that thread forward. Looking back, that might be the actual legacy of the year, not the degree, though that mattered too, but the fact that a scattered group of Bruneian students in a British postgraduate flat turned into a network that is still active a decade and a half later.
