I left for Leicester with Aidil Fitri arriving somewhere over the Middle East, bound for a city I had only read about in a prospectus.
At the time I was a telco professional with a passion for new media. My personal statement said I wanted to understand how the internet was reshaping the way we live and work, and that there was a shortage of that kind of thinking back home. There was a quieter reason too. I had promised myself a Masters before I turned 40, and Chevening made the timing work. Leicester’s MA in New Media and Society fit well enough that I built the year around it, starting with the send off at the airport.
London I already knew, from several trips as a diplomat and on personal ones. Living in Britain was the new part, and living as a student in Leicester in particular, in a city I had never had reason to see.
Heathrow was a British Council rep holding a card with my name on it, then hours of waiting while students bound for Leicester kept arriving. By the time the coaches left there were well over a hundred of us. Friendships started in that induction week of waiting around, and they outlasted the year.
Opal Court became home faster than I expected. My flatmates were as far from home as I was, Taiwan, Cyprus, India, China, and we all worked out kettles and heating and what “self catered” actually meant in practice. A postgraduate flat is a quiet flat, which suited me when deadlines came round, though the freshers’ cultural night meant we were never strangers for long. At 39 I was easily the oldest in my cohort, and older than most of my lecturers and tutors.
The Nottingham reception was 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. Diwali in Leicester is the city’s biggest night. Bruneian students scattered across the UK organised Raya gatherings, and National Day in February worked the same way.
That same month we formed BRULeics, the Brunei students’ society in Leicester. It began as a pot luck dinner and some minutes that someone volunteered to write up. The Bruneians coming up behind us now had something to join.
I never wrote about the hardest part of that year. My father was diagnosed with an illness earlier on, and coursework was difficult to hold onto with that sitting over me, whatever my quiet trip home over the winter break might have suggested. He passed away in April 2010. I tried to get home on an emergency flight just as the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud grounded most of British airspace, and the journey took days longer than it should have. The coursework that came after felt almost incidental. When I graduated, I dedicated the degree to him.
When I was back in Brunei for good, the British High Commission was looking for ways to capture students’ stories, and I ended up working with them on a digital scrapbook project for Bruneian students in the UK.
The scholarship does not end when the flight lands. It becomes a network, an alumni body, a habit of watching out for the students coming after you. Chevening Alumni Brunei exists because people from that era decided the connections were worth keeping formal, and the current executive committee still carries it. A scattered group of Bruneian students in postgraduate flats became a network that is still active a decade and a half later.
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