Interviewer So when you were at uni, did you
have a different plan for your future?
Fairypants I didn’t really have a plan. You have to apply for uni when
you’re 17, and at 17 I did not know what I wanted to do. I
was only halfway through my A-levels and I’ve always liked a bit of everything.
Some people excel at one area, I was always quite
good at a lot of different things. So for my A-levels I did English literature,
art, maths and physics. You don’t normally get that kind of mix, but I was
quite happy with that. But it meant that I couldn’t pick one thing
that I wanted to go and do at university. So I went with English literature just
because I thought it’s really transferrable. I thought, if I need to do
something more specific I can just then do a Masters in something more
specific, or I can study something else. But I thought, for now I’m just going
to do English.
My whole life is full
of accidental things. I’m a great believer in fate. I applied to do
English literature at each of my university choices. I live in Chester, and I’m very close to my mum so I only applied for universities that were an hour away, roughly,
from Chester. I ended up in Bangor
totally accidentally. It was my second choice university,my first choice
was Liverpool. I ended up going to Bangor’s open day after I’d submitted my
choices for universities and it’s like something out of Harry Potter. It was
February and it was snowing and the university is one of the oldest, it’s amazing. So I said to my mum, I want to go here instead
now. When I got my results I rang UCAS up and said no, I want to go to my second choice uni, please, and
they didn’t really know what to do about that. I think they don’t really get
that that often. Anyway, they sent me to Bangor.
I got there on the
first day and I got handed a pack and I’d, obviously I’d applied for English
lit everywhere and this pack said, welcome to English language and English
literature. So I was like, I don’t think I applied for that, I think I applied
for just English literature. But I thought I’d just go with it anyway and just see
what happens, and that was the right thing to do because I had the time of my
life. And I think you learn many things in university even if you don’t choose
a directional degree, if that makes sense. My
degree really has got nothing to do with what I’m doing now. I learned a lot of
other things like self-confidence, and it’s the things that you need to be an
entrepreneur I didn’t really have before I went to university. I don’t think
it’s a coincidence that I launched my business after I graduated.
Interviewer Can you explain a bit more how that self-confidence grew at
uni?
Fairypants I’ve always been kind of a bit
confident, maybe not like super-duper confident, but I’ve always had a bit of
confidence. Because I’m an only child I think you kind of have to be a bit
confident, otherwise you don’t have any friends. So while I was at Bangor, I
joined almost every society under the sun. Not the sporting ones, I don’t do
sport, but I joined up to be on the newspaper, I was a radio DJ on the
student radio station. I signed up for all these things, made all these
friends, and I think in a city as small as Bangor, if you go out, whether it’s
a night out or if you go out shopping, half the people you meet, you
know them because it’s so small and I think that can’t help but give you a bit
of confidence, a bit of feeling at home, even though you’re not at home,
because you go out and you know everybody.
And I think it’s easier to
be popular in university than it is at school, because I think when you go to
university, you can decide who you want to be. On your first day when you meet
everyone that lives in your halls, you can decide who you’re going to be for
the next three years. You can kind of wipe out who you might have been at
school. You know, if you were bullied, you don’t have to be bullied at
university. If you were not that intelligent, or you thought you weren’t that
intelligent at school, you can try harder in university. You know, you can kind
of make your own personality and I think that freedom and
that closeness that you tend to get if you do have a good time at university, I
think it can’t help but make you a bit more confident and give you that sort of
sense of your own ability, I think.
In Part 5 we look at time spent working in retail as a student, and how that may have helped shape Fairypants. xox
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