Daniel

Deciding to come and study at the ANU seemed like a great opportunity. As a small, highly regarded, research driven university – it offered the chance to be taught by some of Australia’s and the worlds premier experts in a range of fields, especially in my interest areas of history and political science.

The guarantee of living on-campus in one of the many residential communities was also attractive to me, who had grown up in rural New South Wales and attended a small school. Besides, coming to Canberra meant tremendous access to all the great national institutions and collections, close proximity to the workings of the nation and the facilities of a city. It also offered the prospects to a country boy of a more relaxed ‘country-town’ pace, in contrast to the hustle and bustle of somewhere like Sydney.

Two key things drove my choice of degrees: a desire to pursue my varied interests, and also the flexibility to take those interests in a variety of directions after I graduate. I began studying towards an Arts degree, dabbling a little in the variety of courses on offer, before finally settling on History and Political Science as my two majors. In my second year, I also picked up law as part of a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Laws degree. All three areas nicely dovetail and complement each other – both in their content, but also in the skills it gives me to research, analyse and formulate my own views and arguments.

What I could never have foreseen, was the sheer enormous variety and number of opportunities to get involved in the life of the university. Whether it’s the many opportunities within a college community, getting involved in volunteering, or helping out on a student society – there is an endless supply of ways to avoid idleness.

As a result of these opportunities, so far at university some of the things I’ve had the privilege of doing include: speaking at a dinner of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers, twice road tripping to visit a remote indigenous community in the Gulf of Carpentaria, spending a month buried in research at the Queensland State Archives as part of a team project on early colonial history; been granted access to the roof of Kings College Chapel during a history summer course at Cambridge University; and sat in on a session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg as part of European Union study program. All of these things are just some of the opportunities which like a great cloud of meteors come hurtling towards you as soon as you step inside the university. Nor are these opportunities necessarily barred to you by a lack of resources. Scholarships, funding and other support has a way of miraculously appearing to help you realise almost anything in which you invest your efforts.

With History Honours on the near horizon, and graduation just beyond that, I’m thinking of pursuing more history study at a postgraduate level. Further into the future than that, my crystal ball grows dim. But, I would like to work in education or public policy. But I don’t feel anxious about not entirely knowing what I’ll end up doing, because I believe that the skills I have obtained during my time at university, place me in good stead to successfully go wherever my interests take me.

Read about Daniel's win in the History category of the International Undergraduate Awards. 

Daniel has since graduated from the university.