About Me: Why Leicester?

The other day I received a formal message from the University of Leicester's Accomodation Services people that I am to arrive in Leicester on Sunday, September 30. Since receiving this, I have been mentally preparing myself. But why on earth did I choose Leicester in the first place? It's not in the top 100 of universities according to the most recent QS ranking (2012/2013) NOR Times Higher Education ranking (2011/2012); in fact, Leicester is almost embarrassingly proud of having risen from 195 to 185 in QS, and is 197 in THE. For comparison, Utrecht (of which Roosevelt Academy is a part) is respectively 85 and 68. Leicester is a member of the 1994 Group, but not of the way more influential Russell Group, which contains elite places like Oxford and Cambridge and indeed, most of the UK universities most attended by RA alumni. I'm not one to go for the standard choices when it comes to picking out schools - second of my elementary school EVER to attend the Helinium secondary school afterwards, and first of the Helinium to attend RA - but my choice seems fairly extraordinary even to my standards.

The history of my attempts to go and study abroad is fairly straightforward, but long and a bit sad at the beginning. I guess in a way it starts at a sleepover at 17, when three friends and I discussed our futures - I had my mind dead set on Roosevelt Academy, though Tilburg (never Rotterdam or Leiden - everyone was going there) was a back-up option, and I confided in them that I really would like to study at Cambridge if I was good enough - but I didn't think I was, so I never bothered.

When February 2012 rolled around, it hit me that I really did ought to get started on my applications for my master's programmes - I had drifted off into a slumber and suddenly people started talking about the statuses of their applications, which did wake me up but a little too late for my own good, like finally waking up after pressing 'snooze' four times. I scrambled to get myself together, saw that Oxford's Criminology deadline had already passed - but I didn't really want to go to Oxford back then anyway - and that Cambridge's was open until March 1. I sent in a crappy application, though I did get a letter of recommendation from Roosevelt Academy's interim dean, because the lower limit was a 3.8 GPA and if I got all As that semester (interesting bit of arguing on my side, there, too, that this was a possible feat for me) my final GPA would be 3.77 and really, that 0.03 difference and my extracurriculars (which are not nearly as impressive as I made them sound) should still get me that letter (I can be persuasive, but only when I really need to be). And then I waited, because I figured that if I didn't get in I'd go to a Dutch university and be done there. All in all, I thought I had it all figured out.

When the rejection came halfway through April, I was devastated for a night (a state of mind that yes, does include Domino's pizza, chocolate mousse and lots of cheap white wine), pulled myself together the morning after, thought of what to do next, and thought of this one book that I'd bought the month before.

See, the month before Kristy and I had attended a conference on a topic in a field almost completely unrelated to Criminology, but still one of my interests (and Kristy's field entirely) - we'd gone to Oxford to listen to academics speak about science and literature (because to literature and linguistics scholars, psychology and psycho-analysis are apparently also sciences, like cognitive science). Being the book-lovers that we are, Kristy and I scoped out Blackwell's almost immediately upon arriving (picking out the nearest bookshop as soon as possible is an activity we inadvertently repeated in Malta, though in no way is that Maltese bookshop allowed to compare itself to Blackwell's), and I chanced upon not one book, but an entire shelf dedicated to books on crime and media alone. I was a happy woman (actually, I experienced a sort of sense of relief not unlike what I felt when I finally saw Tutankhamun's death mask after gazing at pictures for over a decade), especially since I had been searching for a justification to being interested in law, criminology and stylistics simultaneously for over a year, and vowed that if I had enough pounds left by the end of our three-day-stay, I'd buy the book that appealed to me most. I did have just enough pounds left (though I think I would have been capable of purchasing the entire shelf had I not been scared into self-control by RyanAir's carry-on weight restrictions) and bought the book.

So on that dreadful April morning I picked up this book to see who had written it, for I remembered that it was a professor of Criminology somewhere in the UK. What had devastated me the night before was not just being rejected by the university that I had had a university crush (you know, being infatuated with the university itself) on since I first visited the town on a school trip at 14, but also losing the opportunity of going abroad, and the realization that I really was done with the Netherlands. So I panic-applied to three other UK universities that had Criminology/Criminal Justice programmes, and then finally turned to the author of this book, and saw that she taught at the University of Leicester when that book was published. I went to the website, saw she still taught there, saw that they had one of the few actual Departments of Criminology in all of the UK (and even North-West Europe, for in the Netherlands it's often part of the Department of Law, and it's not much different in Belgium and Germany) and that they offered, hold on, not just an Optional Module in Crime and Media (YES!) but also in Transnational Policing (Organized Crime, my other obsession!), Psychology of Evil (How can I not take anything named like that?) and a number of other things that sounded so... ME. I wrote the best application letter I have ever written and will ever write in my life (because applying because of one specific feature that makes you giddy and enthusiastic like a five-year-old in a field that leaves you obsessed like a sixteen-year-old tends to do that), pestered RA's new dean for a letter of recommendation and told my law professor I needed one, like, now. I got in.

Am I still sad about Cambridge's rejection? No. I am angry, though. But angry is good - I was arrogantly annoyed with Leicester for demanding that I take a TOEFL and then I scored really well despite being hungover, tired and despite being done with the test in what seems to be a record time because I wanted to get back to summer school in Middelburg, just to prove to Leicester that I found this demand ridiculous - so I hope this anger can fuel my motivation to prove to Cambridge that they were gravely off in rejecting me.
Am I at peace with my situation? Yes. I'm not sure if I would have been happy at Cambridge, and for now I don't know yet whether I'll be happy at the University of Leicester, but at least the programme seems more tailored to fit my personal obsessions. Leicester is, in a way, my second first choice, and once the RA alumni survey comes my way, I'll definitely be filling it out to say that I did get into my first choice master's programme.