UQSPIA CLASS OF 2019 ALUM
Robati Harrison - I-Kiribati/Australian
Bachelor of Science with a major in Biomedical Science
"Let me get the lows out of the way first. In my very first semester at university, the pressure got way too real and I ended up dropping half of my courses. I’ve failed more courses than I’d like to admit, and I’ve even changed my major twice (or maybe it was three?) because what I had imagined my degree to be was something completely different. I constantly compared myself to those in my program which made me feel more than inadequate. Throughout my university career, I had lost count of how many times I thought I should give up and that I wasn’t good enough for uni.
Fast-forward a couple years later, how I started off uni couldn’t have been more different to how I finished.
The highs: opportunities to travel around Australia and attend major conferences; my first legitimate, paid job with the Domestic Students Recruitment office as a Student Ambassador; and, finding like-minded people who were also trying to find a sense of belonging at an institute, so huge, it’s easy to feel lost in.
UQ SPIA were my saving grace at university. It can be such a daunting and overwhelming place for a student straight out of high school. Not to mention the fact you’re the first in your family to attend uni, you’re the eldest who has the added pressure of setting a good example for his younger sibling, and you have a 5’2” brown lady at home with a wooden spoon in her right hand and super high expectations in her left, called mum. It’s no wonder I crumbled. But UQ SPIA understood these complexities and helped me work around them by celebrating my rich and diverse culture, having a responsibility to serve the Maori and Pacific Islander community at UQ, and the commitment it takes to work through these challenges.
With their help, I’ve now attained my degree and enjoying recent employment as a Multicultural Health Worker for the Good Start Program – a Queensland Health initiative which aims to improve the health and wellbeing of Pacific islander and Maori children and their families. I have plans to return for further study later down the track, but we’ll get to that when it comes."
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