What inspired you to work for Immerse Education?
After returning from China, I knew I wanted to stay in education, but I wanted to find a role where I would still be able to be in contact with students from across the world and work in a multicultural environment.
Immerse Education offered that opportunity - as Academic Manager I could continue to create and develop curricula and implement new, 21st century teaching strategies all while providing top-quality education to students from all over the world. The more we interact with people from other places as we grow up, the more unified and understanding the world will be and Immerse enables me to be part of that mission.
Why do you do what you do?
I loved learning and enjoyed my time at school and university but at the same time I feel like I could have done an awful lot more. I never fulfilled my potential and I regret that. Part of the reason for that was not having the right support or opportunities available to me.
Working in education, I can help scores of young people avoid that and provide them with the platforms to achieve what they are capable of. It drives me each day and pushes me to create programmes that will have a positive impact on young people's lives and futures.
The best part of working in education is getting to meet and connect with inspiring young people, like this incredible group!
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of my job is interacting with students. I love to hear about their backgrounds and what their ambitions are. It's often inspiring to see how driven and hardworking they are at such a young age, but it also sometimes makes you feel a bit depressed about what you weren't doing at their age!
What are some current projects you are working on?
As this is my first year with Immerse, I am working on a lot of projects - with a lot more I'd love to work on if there was more time! I'm helping to create content for our new university preparation site, UniPrepare, which is very engaging and will be a really useful platform for students looking for support in applying and studying abroad.
Another big project on my plate at the moment is creating our first ever Female Future Leaders course for our Academic Insights programme in the summer. This is a very exciting concept, providing an opportunity for young women to gain experience and understanding of key skills and issues that will help them to become the next generation of world leaders!
Why should someone choose Immerse Education over competitors?
Immerse is an incredibly positive place to work. The company has been growing rapidly over the last year - our head office team has already doubled in size since I joined! That alone is exciting enough, but just as important is the emphasis on collaboration and support.
Although everyone has their own clear role, we all help one another and move across departments to share ideas and talents to help improve Immerse as a whole. There's a sense of shared drive and vision and it's encouraging to know that there will always be a number of people ready to help when you come up against any challenges.
I love walking and find it one of the best ways to explore a country. All the better if it's a challenging and beautiful mountain!
What hopes do you have for the future for Immerse Education?
I hope that Immerse keeps expanding. In 2023 we will run our first courses in Australia, and we have plans to take our programmes to other countries in the next few years as well. This will hopefully lead us to a new level, and the idea of bringing our high-quality education to more and more people to whom it was previously unattainable due to travel or monetary restrictions is a hugely exciting one.
What do you hope participants take away from your programs?
I hope that participants on an Immerse program would leave our course with new knowledge, new ideas, new skills and a boost in confidence and more directed ambition. That's a lot from a two week course, but I believe in the quality of what we offer.
We get the very best tutors from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and through our diverse classes students get the opportunity to interact with and learn from impressive young people from all parts of the world. As we focus more on key skills in our courses, participants will hopefully leave with new abilities that will help them on the next stages of their academic and life journey.
If you could participate on one of your organization's programs, where would you go and what would you do?
I would definitely participate in our Oxbridge Online Research Programme. This program matches you with an Oxbridge tutor who will help you work on a research project over a two-to-eight week period. I would love to do an American history research project, sharing my ideas with an Oxbridge tutor and getting amazing personal feedback on it.
I think it's a tremendous opportunity that is available to many people who wouldn't normally get that opportunity, and I'd be very happy to spend two weeks researching the Cold War and talking to an expert about it!
Connecting with people when traveling is incredible. You may even find someone very special and end up with a multicultural family!
Why is it important for people to travel abroad and experience new cultures?
It is immensely important to travel abroad and experience new cultures. It definitely changed my life, and has made me a better and more rounded person. Experiencing new cultures expands someone's ideas and conceptions and is fundamental to true success in this century.
A lot of the issues faced by the world in recent years stem from people who are threatened by new ideas and new faces and fundamentally this comes from lack of exposure to and education on other cultures. The more people can travel and experience other worlds - especially during their formative years - will bring us all closer together and make the future a positive and collaborative one.
What does meaningful travel mean to you?
Meaningful travel to me is not just about ticking off a list of sights and landmarks. Although there is something special about experiencing those places - they are landmarks for a reason - it is not the best way to truly experience a culture. To do that, you need to take in the side streets, the lesser-known spots, the small restaurants that don't have the fancy signs and most importantly try to communicate and connect with local people.
The most meaningful travel experiences you can have will involve other humans - the people that you met and engaged with, that you learned something from, that had an impact on your way of thinking and made a change on who you are, no matter how small that change may be.
Experiencing new cultures pushes you to do new things and become more confident in yourself.
What hopes do you have for the future of international education?
My biggest hope for the future of international education is that it stops being referred to as 'international' and just becomes 'education'. By that I mean that it becomes so common that countries around the world sync their educational priorities and focuses, that it becomes commonplace and expected that people will experience other cultures and ideas as a matter of course.
A lesson we should take from the pandemic is that we must never take traveling as a given, and we should therefore take full advantage of the opportunities made available to us. The more we expand out and interact, the further we travel, the smaller the world will become, and international education is the best way to make sure that happens.
How is your company handling Covid protocols? What should participants know about your Covid readiness? How are you assisting participants with navigating the new travel landscape?
We have made a lot of effort to provide peace of mind for our students regarding Covid. We not only are constantly updating our protocols to be in line with U.K. regulations, we are going a step further and adding extra protections for our participants based on our own experiences and the worries and concerns of those participants and their families.
We make sure that lateral flow or PCR tests are available and communicate with students and their parents to maintain both the safety of others and the participant themselves. We also provide online capabilities that in the event a student tests positive and can't attend our in-person courses they can still enjoy Immerse Education virtually.
