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Meet the international student: Ekhomalomen Inegbenose Pierre, from Nigeria

Recipient of the International Excellence Scholarship, Ekhomalomen Inegbenose Pierre came to Birkbeck to study MSc Information Technology. Here he shares more about his background and experience, and even gives tips to future Birkbeck students. 

Ekhomalomen Inegbenose Pierre

Discovering myself at Birkbeck and beyond 

Birkbeck wasn’t just a college to me; it was a revelation. Nestled in Bloomsbury, this esteemed institution gave me more than just an MSc in Information Technology – it handed me a kaleidoscope through which I saw the vibrant hues of life, both academically and personally. 

My Birkbeck and London love affair 

I vividly recall my first evening class at Birkbeck; the room echoed with a medley of accents, reminding me of London’s cultural symphony. Conversations shifted from coursework to personal anecdotes, from hometown tales to shared dreams. In that diversity, I found camaraderie. Beyond Birkbeck’s walls, London became my playground. From spontaneous weekend trips to Brick Lane for its famous curries to late-night study sessions at quirky cafes in Shoreditch, every corner of this city whispered stories and secrets. 

To all future Birkbeck international scholars 

Dear future Birkbeckian, dive headfirst into everything! That small seminar you’re thinking about? Attend it. The group from class planning a walk along the river Thames? Join them. Each experience, no matter how trivial it seems, adds a brushstroke to your London canvas. 

Trials, tribulations, and triumphs 

Juggling coursework, London’s allure, and bouts of homesickness wasn’t always a walk in Hyde Park. The UK’s academic approach, emphasizing self-study and critical analysis, often overwhelmed me, but I knew it was an important learning curve. My coffee-fueled nights, deciphering complex IT problems, were punctuated by Skyping family and sharing laughs. A tip? Embrace every challenge; they’re often veiled lessons.  

Hidden gems: my sanctuaries in the city 

There’s a small nook in the British Museum, away from the usual tourist buzz, where I often lost myself among ancient scripts. It became my thinking spot, my refuge from the rigours of coursework. 

Outside Bloomsbury, the quaint bookshops along London’s famous South Bank became my haven. Nestled with a book, against the backdrop of the Thames, I found serenity amidst the city’s bustle. 

Internships and insights 

Midway through my course, I stumbled upon an internship opportunity with a tech startup during a Birkbeck mixer. As a Junior Systems Developer, I wasn’t just coding; I was imbibing the entrepreneurial spirit of London’s tech scene. That startup environment, with its blend of chaos and creativity, its failures and triumphs, taught me resilience and innovation. My MSc journey at Birkbeck, intertwined with London’s charm, has been a rollercoaster of emotions, experiences, and epiphanies. It’s a chapter of my life I’d reread endlessly, cherishing each word, each memory.  

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James Lovelock – chemist, environmentalist and Gaia hypothesis theorist

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

James Lovelock

James Lovelock is best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the Earth is a self-regulating system, with that evidence forming Gaia theory. Among his numerous and notable inventions are the electron capture detector, making possible the detection of ozone-damaging CFC gases, and the microwave oven.  

James studied chemistry at Birkbeck College, just before the start of the Second World War, and in 2008 was made a Fellow of the College. He was brought up a Quaker and indoctrinated with the notion that God is a still, small voice within. 

He was viewed as one of the UK’s most respected independent scientists and never officially retired, taking daily two-to-three-mile walks until his later years, and publishing his book Novacene, an argument for the emergence of a new age from existing artificial intelligence systems, just before his hundredth birthday. 

James died in 2022, on the day of his 103rd birthday and, besides his scientific achievements, will be remembered as an environmentalist with his research highlighting some of the most recent environ

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Avtar Brah, founder of Southall Black Sisters

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Avtar Brah

Avtar was a Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck; a specialist in race, gender and ethnic identity issues and was awarded an MBE in 2001 in recognition of her research.

Born in India, raised in Uganda, and made stateless by the anti-Asian policies of Idi Amin in the 1970s, she was made a refugee overnight and forced to extend her stay in the UK into a long-term residence.

She attended a thousands-strong demonstration organised by women’s collective Southall Black Sisters against the National Front in the mid-1970s which gathered national media attention and resulted in hundreds of demonstrators being arrested.

Avtar lectured and researched at Birkbeck for over twenty years from 1985 until her retirement from professorship. Her most seminal works are Cartographies of Diaspora, which takes a feminist, post-structuralist lens to analysing ‘difference’ and ‘diversity,’ and Hybridity and Its Discontents, exploring the history of ‘hybridity’ across multiple continents.

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Isabelle Habib – Access and Engagement Access Manager

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Isabelle Habib

As Access Manager (Forced Migrants), Isabelle’s work is key to Birkbeck’s commitment to its founding principle of supporting adults who would not otherwise be able to access education.

Isabelle engages with, inspires and supports forced migrants and asylum seekers to access education through Birkbeck’s award-winning, donor-funded Compass Project, which dramatically improves the lives of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the UK. She joined Birkbeck following time as a volunteer supporting forced migrants. She says Compass is a vital way to “resist the negative rhetoric on migration.”

Her work contributes to Birkbeck’s recognition as a University of Sanctuary, the first higher education institution in London to be awarded this status, in 2021, for its work to provide safety, solidarity and empowerment to people seeking sanctuary.

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Elaine Hawkins, programme director of Higher Education Introductory Studies

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Elaine Hawkins

Elaine Hawkins was Programme Director of Birkbeck’s Certificate in Higher Education Introductory Studies from 2003-2012, which helps to get people back into studying who might lack the required entry qualifications or who need a course to help them prepare for degree-level study.

In addition to pathways in the arts, humanities and social sciences, Elaine developed new modules in nursing and business and established agreements with degree programmes across Birkbeck to enable students to progress within the College to continue with evening study.

Thanks to her drive and enthusiasm, the programme grew from around 30 students in 2003 to over 450, running in eight different centres across London. Some classes were delivered in Sure Start centres which tapped into the aspirations of women in hard-to-reach communities and this initiative won the Times Higher Education award for Widening Participation in 2008.

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Edith ‘Biddy’ Lanchester, “new woman” and socialist

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Edith Lanchester

Edith Lanchester was a socialist campaigner and a strong feminist voice in women’s history, born into a wealthy middle-class family, but insistent on challenging many of the oppressive elements of her time.

She was educated at home and at the then Birkbeck Institute in science subjects, with her family intending for her to become a teacher. However, at 24 she fell in love with a working-class clerk, James Sullivan, announcing that she would move in with him.

Her parents accused “The Birkbeck” as well as membership of the Socialist Democratic Federation for having “unhinged her mind”; and when she argued that marriage would take away her independence, her father and brothers had her committed to the Priory insane asylum.

Her local MP, John Burns, secured her release after four days and the whole affair became a scandal, sparking debates about the state of marriage in society. Her false detention reinforced her views and Lanchester remained a prominent warrior for women’s rights and freedoms: she waved the suffragette’s green, white, and purple flag in Trafalgar Square and was even imprisoned for her role in a protest.

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Abi Daré, Novelist

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Abi Daré

Abi is a Nigerian-born award-winning novelist who received critical acclaim for her first novel, The Girl With the Louding Voice. The book won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts back in 2018 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

She graduated with a Master’s in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, of which she has said: “I needed to sit with people like myself, like minds who had an interest in writing. I wanted to do something serious with it. So that’s where I started my publishing journey from. The book was part of my thesis.” She has also credited her supervisor, Julia Bell with encouraging her to enter writing competitions.

In 2021, Abi was one of the twenty-four essay contributors for You Are Not Going Back: An essay from the collection, Of This Our Country, which offers an honest depiction, told by Nigerians themselves, of the culture and traditions of their Nigerian identity. She now works in project management for an academic publisher.

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Durdana Ansari OBE – first Muslim woman captain of the British Royal Navy

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Durdana Ansari

Durdana is an entrepreneur and activist and the first Muslim woman appointed as Honorary Captain of the British Royal Navy. She is a former charity director and journalist at the BBC World Service and received her degree in media and journalism from Birkbeck.

Durdana established The Pearl Foundation to teach English, reading, writing and computer skills to British-Muslim women, as well as integrate these women into wider society by building self-confidence and enhancing their quality of life. Her work with ‘The Pearl Education Foundation’ and the ‘Ethnic Minorities Foundation’ led to the recruitment of approximately 9000 students and 700 volunteers.

She was awarded ‘Order of the British Empire’ (OBE) in 2012 and is currently working on her autobiography to share her experiences and inspire the next generation: “I want the world to know how a woman from a developing country managed to follow her passions and achieve her goals.”

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Rosalind Franklin – chemist and X-ray crystallographer

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

 

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and expert in crystallography who first photographed DNA to reveal its double-helix shape uncovering the mystery behind how life is passed down from generation to generation. Her commitment to the highest standards of scientific research is said to have brought “lasting benefit to mankind.”

Before that, her research specialty was coal and she was at the forefront of techniques in X-ray crystallography, which had only been used to investigate a limited range of matter by the early 1950s.

While James Watson and Francis Crick famously got the credit for ‘discovering’ the structure of DNA, it is generally accepted that Franklin’s research was more advanced. They admitted, after her death, that Franklin’s data had been crucial in proving their hypothesis.

Franklin was one of the few female chemists in the world at this time, moving from King’s College London to Birkbeck in 1953. She commented that the atmosphere at Birkbeck was friendlier, but the lab conditions were less favourable.

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Emma “Ma” Francis – canteen worker throughout World War II

To commemorate the College’s bicentenary in 2023, we’re showcasing 200 ‘Birkbeck Effects’ which capture the incredible stories of our vibrant and diverse community, highlighting their achievements and impact on the world. 

Emma 'Ma' Francis with her husband

“Ma” Francis was one of Birkbeck’s unsung heroes, an essential worker during the second world war who made a considerable contribution to sustaining university life.

She joined Birkbeck’s Fetter Lane premises in 1896 as a canteen worker, and left fifty years later, aged eighty. When bombs dropped in the vicinity, she was “unruffled,” calmly handing out mugs of coffee and “sardines on toast, with fried tomatoes twopence extra.”

On 11 May 1941, incendiary bombs started falling on the College. Ma Francis made her way to the College’s kitchen. A “policeman in Fetter Lane tried to stop me,” she later recalled, who told her “Can’t go down there, Ma!” She abruptly retorted, “Impudence. Young man … I’ve got my work to do – you can’t stop me.” And work she did. Although the building next to Birkbeck was a “raging inferno,” Ma Francis made coffee for everyone on a Primus stove and then served 150 people for lunch. She was heard muttering, “Lucky I cooked the joints yesterday!”

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