Today I closed my survey, I am thrilled with the responses and I think I have so much to work with 🙂
I got 19 written responses From countries like UK, China, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, India and Saudi Arabia
There was a mixture of responses regarding feeling settled in London. Some did and enjoyed their freedom of living somewhere like the UK compared to their home countries. But others didn’t and felt confined and restricted.
Overall people agreed that building a community at university is important, but many find it difficult to connect with others in a way they want. One student said “Yes definitely. There should be people who you can talk to in your own language, do rituals together that keep you close to your home. I occasionally host dinner parties where we drink Raki and talk, the national alcoholic drink of Turkey.”
The idea of finding people to do rituals with was brought up a couple of times. With one student saying they enjoyed attending an event held by the university and that it was a great way to meet other students from their home country who weren’t on the same course as them.
As for people’s experiences in London, I was able to get a great mixture of positives and negatives. I think balancing these out would be a good idea. There are a couple of these that really lend themselves to visuals and could be animated in an interesting way.
Some examples;
- Someone mentioned they enjoyed people watching on the tube, that the diversity is like seeing fish in an aquarium. But that when it gets very packed it’s like taken under a large wave of water.
- The city is too commercial for my liking, the lifestyle is very rushed, it feels like the kind of place where time works at 2x speed but you really didn’t do much besides work and hustle, I don’t think that’s the life I want to have, I am ambitious but I also know when to take breaks, it doesn’t feel like London knows when to pause.
- London has lots of lovely historical buildings and green parks and squares. I still love walking in London and taking it all in. Where I’m from, unfortunately most people don’t care about history or the environment.
- Someone said that they don’t enjoy the food here, but they’ve been able to make friends with people by bonding over this and exploring new places around London with them.
- Another said that they feel that it’s more difficult to have deep and meaningful conversations here and they feel themselves becoming shallower in the way they talk.
- ‘London is overwhelming. I love the anonymity such a big city gives me, but I often feel like I’m being taken under a wave of people.’
- ‘It’s an intense city but there are ways of decompressing and keeping yourself from burning out, talking walks in parks, visiting all the little museums and talking through things with your friends.’
There are some other examples, but these really stuck out to me.
I have already started to sketch up some of the responses into storyboards as I feel like they really lend themselves to visuals.
Going on my next steps are building a script from these responses and completing the storyboard so I can do some tests.