and I was her referee and I met with her social worker

because I was her referee

and she talked me through sort of the assessment

and what they'd done and said to me

I think you'd make a really good social worker

and I looked into it and thought

that's everything that I believe in

I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life

and I believe in fighting for the underdog

I believe in justice

I believe in helping people who are vulnerable

and it made complete sense so I applied for the degree

I've always been drawn towards people

especially in terms of helping people

and I think I learned that from a very young age

when my parents, they started fostering

they were foster carers right from the age of two

and so I've always grown up with having

other young people in our home

and watched the kind of support that my parents

have given to those children

and that carried on right up until the age of about 16

and then at that point I started my own journey

of volunteering and working with children and families

so social work just for me seemed like the next step

it seemed like the career where I could

make a difference in people's lives

which is something that felt important for me

when I was younger I was in a relationship

where there was a lot of domestic violence

and I luckily had a really supportive family

and a really good system around me

but I want to come into social work to help people who

don't have that support to empower them

and help them become and get a better life

just like I have myself

at the age of 18 I came to Brookes

I was advised to go away and get some life experience

so I went into a learning disability team

within a care home

and then went on to do end-of-life care

within the community which now has given me

real good insight into what social work is about

and here I am today

I really wanted to help people

and on a one-to-one basis

because our lives are very complicated

and I didn't know how to help people

I didn't know whether to go into charity work

or do law, or maybe go into sociology

study society in general

and so social work has all of that combined

we can help people with the help of the law

my root into social work was quite a convoluted one

I'd been working in social care

for maybe six or seven years

before I decided that I needed to get a kind of

academic insight into social work

I studied here at this university back in 97

graduated in 2000 studying fine art

and during that time I used to regularly go to

South Africa and volunteer with an organisation

that supported young children and babies

that were born HIV-positive

which was extremely challenging

but also extremely rewarding

but what it did was fire up in me a real interest in people

and a desire to help people and from that

when I left uni with my art degree I went to

the Terrence Higgins Trust

and got a job as a youth worker there

and I actually used the art degree to be fair

setting up an art therapy group and from there

went from one organisation to another

getting more and more experience

within the field of social care

until it got to the situation where I felt that

I needed to have an academic qualification

it was the right time for me

to be able to come back to university

and also society or rather government was saying that

in order to do the work I wanted to do

you had to have this academic qualification

so I decided I'd come back to Brookes

since I had such a good experience here before

and take up the qualification

which I did and I haven't regretted that at all

not once