…to Edinburgh!

I won’t apologise for not writing in the last three months, but I had certainly not forgotten about my blog this time. My master’s kept me busy with assignments and submissions – mainly due to procrastination – and so did my part-time work as a dental clinic receptionist on the weekends.

To be honest, the move did not come so easy to me. I had to take a decision for myself to either pursue higher education for better career opportunities or just do with my then-current state of joblessness. (I wasn’t jobless per say, I was running my small calligraphy business and had good amount of work every month to keep me busy). I was pretty confident that I wanted to build a career in the field of Tourism and so began my research. I was sure I did not want to move to USA, Canada and Australia because 1) they are too far, and 2) I wasn’t ready to completely isolate myself from my family. I still researched for courses in those countries, but did not find a course that appealed to me.

Actually, from the beginning I knew I wanted to either go to Scotland or Wales or some place in England not close to my sister’s place in Surrey (am I a bad sister?). Europe was also on the cards, more specifically the Nordic and Scandinavian side. I found a lot of courses in UK which were tourism related, many of them in Scotland. Therefore, I narrowed my research to Scotland and a few universities in England.

In between all of this convincing my dad for letting me study tourism was the most difficult part of the process. My second eldest sister backed me up and agreed to convince our dad with me. I am not a confident person in front of my dad so convincing him was a moment of victory! I really don’t know if I put up a strong argument for him to send me to the UK to study tourism, but he finally agreed. At this point I had shortlisted 4 universities in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Winchester and Loughborough – two courses related to tourism marketing/management, one in sports marketing and one in curation. The one in Edinburgh also did January intakes, while the rest did September intakes only. It was already too late for me to apply for the September 2018 intakes: choices of January 2019 or September 2019 were the only remaining options.

My father and I agreed that I visit these universities in October 2018 and meet course coordinators to finalise one. And with that, my other sister and I flew to Glasgow to visit the first campus of University of Glasgow.

End of Part 1. To be continued in Part 2.