Samarah

Samarah is in her third year studying PPE. Thanks to our Access and Outreach programme, she was given a preview of Magdalen that made studying here feel like an achievable goal.

I’m a third year PPE student at Magdalen, born and raised in London. My mum is Spanish and my dad is Algerian, so I’m a second-generation immigrant. Neither of my parents went to university, so applying was a totally foreign process to me.

I was applying to receive sponsored tutoring for my GCSEs when the subject of Oxford first came up. I mentioned that I loved Politics, but wanted to study Economics because of how much I enjoyed GCSE Statistics. The interviewer asked me if I’d ever heard of PPE, a ‘really famous’ degree that started in Oxford – I hadn’t, and he encouraged me to look into it. When the school visited Magdalen a year later as part of the outreach programme, I realised for the first time that this was a tangible place, and a tangible goal. We had mock tutorials, we met some students and tutors, had lunch in Hall, and saw the deer…

I’m currently studying the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa – it’s probably my favourite topic so far. It’s quite close to home, being of Algerian descent, and I’ve really enjoyed it. One of my favourite tutorials was a recent Middle East and North African tute, which my tutor held at the Ashmolean. We wandered around and talked about that week’s essay, which was on Orientalism. Looking at the curation choices and how each region was presented was really interesting – it was literally seeing everything that I study in application.

After this I’d love to do an MPhil in Development Studies. I would just like to reiterate a big thank you to the alumni who support Access and Outreach. It makes such a big difference, and helps students like me to see Oxford as a place where we can truly belong.