Zeynab is an East Londoner through and through, going to primary school in Dagenham and finishing her education in Ilford. After just one term as a first year student at Warwick, Zeynab decided to apply to the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning for a research grant: she wanted to research the issues around ethnic minorities gaining varied levels of access to higher education, and to understand why the figures were particularly sparse for young black women at Russell Group universities. She was subsequently awarded £1000 and spent the next five months deep in research, working through her first summer as a student to write up her report over the following seven months.
Zeynab's finished project - A Report Addressing the Under-Representation of Black Female Students at Russell Group Universities - revealed that one of the biggest barriers to entry for young black girls was a lack of teacher assistance and support in applying for elite universities. To help overcome this challenge, Zeynab decided to set up the Black Girls Mentoring Project (BGMP), offering black girls aged 14-18 aiming for the top universities the opportunity to have an accomplished black female mentor aged 18-25 years old. Within twenty-four hours of launching the project on social media, she'd reached one hundred thousand readers, had 2000 retweets and received 65 applications from mentees. In total, Zeynab selected 125 girls for her first cohort of mentees, matching two pupils with each of her 62 carefully selected mentors.
The inaugural BGMP event, The Black Girl Uni Guide, was held in August 2017 in a youth centre in East London, giving 100 attendees the chance to hear from guest speakers, participate in practical workshops, and meet others aspiring to attend university. Zeynab created an accompanying booklet with tips to exam success, information about Russell Group universities and some personal statement examples. She also conducted a participant survey at the end of the event, which revealed that 98% of the attendees found the day very useful and felt more confident in applying to Russell Group universities.
The following summer, Zeynab hosted the second BGMP event at Barclays Investment Bank, where she had recently completed an internship. This In The City event was primarily focused on the professional services, including a personal branding workshop, a Q&A session with black women pursuing different career paths including Law, Banking, Technology and Journalism, and an address from the Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Barclays.
Zeynab recently expanded the reach of BGMP by recruiting fifteen university ambassadors, former mentees and other black female undergraduates who help to promote the programme and recruit more volunteer mentors. Zeynab has also met the Head of Widening Participation at the University of Warwick to discuss her ideas around creating an official access programme to the institution for black female pupils, presenting her extensive research as the basis for their productive initial meetings. She is currently planning how best to sustain BGMP once she has left university, to ensure that the mentoring programme will continue to function for years to come. Zeynab was recently invited to 10 Downing Street to discuss efforts to address educational inequality in the UK.
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