Law BA(Hons): After you graduate

"I didn't have the most auspicious starts to my academic career or indeed have a great experience of education having grown up in Harlow, Essex which had its challenges particularly if you were poor and from an ethnic minority background. For example, I attended a comprehensive school where the teachers wouldn't show up to teach and where most people I attended school with would spout racist nonsense and had little hope or ambition in their lives. How I ever survived and scraped through my ‘A' levels I'll never know. But my life literally changed when I was offered the place to read law at Kingston Polytechnic (as it was called in those days).

"I was driven by the desire to help others – and I'm still driven by this desire today - as well as the overpowering sense of injustice that so many people face in their own lives and somehow feel incapable of finding a solution to that.

"I knew I had the internal strength to make something of my life – I just needed the environment in order to achieve my potential, something that had been lacking throughout my own childhood and into my teens.

"So you can imagine what I must have felt like arriving in the leafy splendour of Kingston Hill in Surrey where the neighbours were more likely to be multi-millionaires than on the dole queue.

"If there's one thing I'd like to pass on to anyone vaguely interested in my personal story it's this – don't waste a minute of the time you have at Kingston.

"The opportunity to learn at one of the most respected law schools in the country, to be taught by inspirational lecturers who genuinely cared passionately about the learning experience and to meet some of the most incredible people from all over the world is a rare and precious opportunity that shouldn't be wasted.

"I'm very proud of having attended the Kingston Law School and to have graduated in the top set of my year – I certainly wouldn't have achieved anything like a successful career had it not been for the chance to achieve my potential and then to push myself even further than I'd ever dreamed I could.

"And ultimately that's what Kingston gave me above everything else – the chance to believe that anything is achievable if you put your mind to it."