First-Gen Geoscience Community Blog
There wasn’t a whole lot to do with my hours, growing up on a 1970s estate on the outskirts of a fishing town. My father spent much of his time working at a local factory and my mother worked part time, so there weren’t many chances for us to go to beaches that were so tantalisingly close – just a few miles away. But on the times we managed to, I revelled in it! I was lucky to be born in fossil-filled Dorset, and the odd spontaneous trip to Lulworth and Swanage set in a passion for palaeontology that made me known by my classmates as “that dinosaur kid” far beyond the age it was cool to like them.
Another shot of dumb luck came when I passed my 11 plus* exams (though I still don’t know what a non-verbal reasoning test means). However, this was swiftly followed by a period where I undoubtedly felt held back by my background. I was the first one in my family to go to a grammar school, and a mix of insecurity and imposter syndrome set in fast. I put on weight and started skipping classes, sometimes even for weeks at a time, putting me somewhat behind my peers in ability – by the end of Year 9, it looked set that I was to move schools. Like many teenagers, I felt like I just didn’t fit in with anybody else; with this in mind, going from “the dinosaur kid” to “the poor kid” in the eyes of classmates only helped to amplify my feelings. I owe a lot to the small circle of teachers who managed to rekindle my childhood interest in natural science, giving me the motivation to steadily turn myself around just a few months before my GCSE exams. The slowly climbing grades with each mock exam result made me finally feel worthy of a place there, and for the first time in ages I felt my life had the ability to go somewhere.
These experiences bared hard on how I approached higher education and university. In my ecstasy at receiving my GCSE results I rashly wrote my A-Level choices on the form – Geology, History, Music and English – and later once I was sure I wanted to do a degree in Geology, it felt much too late. Most UK universities I could find required two sciences for entry onto an Earth Science course, and the one science I had in A-level Geology was considered far less valuable than any of the core science trio (as I was informed in a very disheartening chat with an unnamed university’s admissions tutor). Nonetheless, I was encouraged to persevere by teachers and family, and despite my expectation of unanimous rejection my sister and I became the first members of our family to enrol at university. Being more homely than I, my sister enrolled at nearby Bournemouth University, while I set off for London quietly desperate for a new and more fruitful phase of my life. For people of a working-class background university isn’t just about getting a degree and making friends: it’s about being perhaps the first in the family with the chance to live your life outside of your hometown.
My experience at university has been overall a happy one. With this zigzag experience in my memory I was determined to squeeze every drop out of the new life I owed to the newfound drive placed in me, and I became known for being a visibly, probably annoyingly keen student. I often look back and cringe at how I behaved in my first year, but what people didn’t know was that for me, I simply had to be that way. I could never let myself go back to being how I was before. If I felt out of place at a local grammar school, how was I going to feel at university of all places? It often lingers in the back of my mind, but it feels good to say that I’m more resilient now than I was some years ago. If anything it makes me proud to feel I might not fully belong here, to in some way represent my family in the world as I start my Masters, with the aim of slowly climbing the tall mountain that academia looks to me now.
Sam Bright, MSci student at UCL, UK specialising in dinosaur palaeobiology (@pipedreamdino)
*The 11 plus is an exam taken by some UK students in their final year of primary education, which governs admission to certain schools