My History

The experience that I had as a Chevening Scholar is so strong that I can hardly forget it for the rest of my life. That year that I lived in Colchester, Essex has been one of my most relevant experiences that I have ever lived, but how did everything start?

How different or similar can a Chevening scholar story be? With any doubt, every story is quite different, as the Chevening community in Mexico consists of around of 1,400 scholars, from a wide range of generations, expectations, academic backgrounds, family environment, etc. At the same time, I am sure that we feel the same affection for UK and their people, and a great gratitude for their support to get an academic degree in a prestigious institution, as well as a bunch of lifetime experiences.

I think that in my case, it has been a double success story.

I had the firm conviction to study at UK since the early Nineties, as many friends from my undergraduate times, and even former pupils, began a Mexican exodus to UK universities to follow graduate programmes. However, job responsibilities postponed the achievement of my dream, which grew even stronger after my first visit to England back in 1998, when I fell in love with the British culture and way of life.

Soon after, I began the scholarship application, and I have to say that I enjoyed the whole process. Selecting teaching institutions, upgrading my command of English, filling in carefully every point on the application form, and keeping information and documents well organised was exciting and challenging, At that time it had been seven years since the last time I visited a classroom as a student!

The last part of the application process, at the beginning of 2000, was a mix of emotions. On the one hand, the day the people of the British Council phoned me at home to tell me that I had been chosen to get the scholarship I was listening to Blur's inspiring Britpop anthem “The Universal”, specially the part that goes something like “...every paper that you read says tomorrow it's your lucky day, well here's your lucky day…”. On the other hand, some weeks before, in an unexpected way, my mother began to develop symptoms from a disease that remained undetected for years, so the final decision to depart to UK was very hard because of leaving my family in a less than ideal situation, but I was encouraged by my mother to keep on, which reinforced my commitment to pursue successful studies and come back to my country to make the most of the Msc degree to be acquired.

Because of these circumstances, during my stay at UK I lived each day as if was the last day of my life, and everything seemed to fit. I wasn't wrong in choosing York, the city is just beautiful, fancy and full of history, the Campus system avoided long distances from accommodation to classrooms and the facilities allow us to focus on assignments.

On accommodation, the “G” House at St. Lawrence Court of The University of York Campus, I had the best of both worlds, I had four English housemates, Gilly, Claire, Tiffy and Lisa, that were really kind and friendly, and two Mexican housemates, Edson and Angie, so home wasn't far away at all. It was very funny, but the first housemate I met was Angie, but I missed the point and thought she was from Sri Lanka, and I spoke to her in English because I thought I would be the only Mexican student at York. I was wrong, that year we were something like 40 noisy Mexicans!

I remember teaching techniques and organisation of lectures from which I learnt about theoretical models and instrumental devices to represent in few words and elegant mathematical expressions features of economic behaviour that in any other way could take pages and pages to talk about, and I enjoyed a lot the team work to prepare seminars, and assignments, since it was daring to reconcile contrasting points of view and overcome language barriers between members of different nationalities.

Fortunately, not all was school, and I used to have a weekly escapade in order to do my shopping, which I took advantage of in order to keep in touch with common life in a British city. I really liked to visit Virgin, HMV and Borders to listen to amazing new singles and albums every week, have lunch at a typical pastries shop, admire the Roman Wall, the York Minster and Clifford's Tower on the way to Sainsburys where I used to buy my food.

Life at “G” House was very nice and pleasant, like a sitcom TV show. Once our English housemates prepared for us a whole pre Christmas Dinner, with turkey, Christmas Pudding and Yorkshire potato cakes; then the Mexican team cooked a Mexican lunch with “enchiladas”, “chilaquiles” and even “guacamole”; Taiwanese cuisine was also well represented by Elizabeth, and our housemate from Trinidad and Tobago, Anil, brought more happiness to our place with his delicious dishes. Usually a single coffee break became a short festivity. At the end of the course even a boy living next door, Antony, became a usual guest at the “lunch and dinner society”, Antony added a Belgian flavour to our lives.

There is no need to tell that at the end of the course I finished a great deal more understanding of economics, a lot of great memories, excess baggage because all the music I bought, and some extra weight - enough to put me on a diet.

Back to Mexico I had the fortune to find my mother under proper medical surveillance and treatment, my boss at that time had kept my position and afterwards granted me a promotion, so I didn't need to look for a new job.

So far, I have returned to the UK in 2002 for the Graduation Ceremony at York, in 2005 to spend New Year's Eve at London, and I am looking forward to visiting friends in London and Edinburgh this year; at the office I continue dealing with public finances audit issues; I am keeping in touch with my ex Yorkers housemates and classmates, either visiting them around the world or meeting them when they happen to come to Mexico, and of course, sharing nice moments and events and exchanging experiences and links with other Chevenings thanks to the excellent job of UK Embassy in Mexico.