catching up with old girls
Manayka Walia Class of 2019
M
anayka Walia left RMS in 2019 and is now studying Sports Science at St Mary’s University. Since March 2019 she has been the Student Champion representing BAME students. In the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in 2020, we caught up with her to find out about how she got involved. I was born and raised in Dubai and came to RMS for Sixth Form as a boarder on a Sports Scholarship. After two fantastic years at RMS, I decided to go to St Mary’s University to study Sports Science. I wanted to be at a university where I could make a difference and because St Mary’s was small, it felt like that would be possible. When I visited it felt like a very inclusive place and it turned out to be the first university that accepted me with an unconditional offer too! As part of my course, I have been studying a module on Sociology for Sports Science. In that module there was a lecture on racism in sport. I have always been interested in this subject; for my EPQ (extended project qualification) at RMS I studied the question ‘To what extent does racism exist in the Champions League?’ The module was taken by a lecturer called Michael Hobson, one of the best lecturers in the university. (You can read more about his work here: https://tinyurl.com/y4y5gukc.) At the end of the lecture Michael Hobson said ‘if you want to get involved with this, there is a way; send an email to student engagement’. That was early on in my first year and I was very hesitant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that student who looks too keen, doing
20 | Masonica 2021
everything, joining everything. I didn’t want to get picked on for doing too much in my first year. I remember writing down the email address and thought I would just wait and see how I felt about it. A few months later, a couple of things had happened in my own family which got me thinking. Initially I felt powerless but then I started to wonder what I could do; I was inspired to follow up on the email. I wrote in to say, ‘I want to help, I want to get involved, I want to do something, I don’t care what it is, can I do something?’ A woman called Elizabeth who is in charge of student engagement across the whole university replied and invited me to meet her for coffee. While we were chatting, she offered me the BAME Student Champion role. It was a new role within the university and she told me that I was the first person to have said anything or emailed her about it. She needed more student representation, especially from ethnic minority students. It is a big responsibility, it is a paid role within the university, but I was excited about what we could do. As part of the role, I had started to plan meetings with lecturers and the Head of HR but just as we were getting things off the ground, lockdown began. I was planning to run debates and awareness days, but of course everything was delayed. Eventually in October, for Black History Month, we did manage to get an Afro-Caribbean catering company to come in to university for the day and give everyone on campus Afro-Caribbean food.
