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When Veli Aghdiran graduated from Cambridge in the depths of the 2008 crash, he wasn’t sure exactly what he did want to do, but he was at least clear about one thing: “I didn’t see myself staying in the UK.”

A decade later, as global vice-president of professional development for high-flying media agency Essence, he has found a career he loves – and, true to his original wish, he is based some 7,000 miles from London.

“I’ve spent the last two-and-a-half years living in Singapore, travelling between our nine Asia-Pacific offices, working with people from diverse cultures and backgrounds…I truly believe that if you can get or create the opportunity to work outside of your ‘home’ environment, you give yourself the chance to supercharge your learning and growth as a worker and as a human.”

Interviewed for the media and marketing news website, Mumbrella Asia, Veli (OE 1996–2003) reflects with great honesty on his time at QE: “The first three years were all about being top of the class. I was not one of the cool kids who did their homework on the bus on the way into school. The next three years were all about minimising the amount of time I had to spend doing work so that I could spend more time awkwardly trying to be cool and annoying my parents.

“North London is an ethnically diverse community and my school truly reflected its diversity. I appreciate the fact that I grew up in an environment where, by and large, diversity was celebrated and embraced. That may be part of what drew me to the study of languages – growing up speaking Turkish, English and a tiny bit of Greek, then learning French and Russian at school.” [Veli is pictured here as a child.]

“I had the opportunity to go to Russia on a School trip in the late 1990s. A group of 20 of us headed to Moscow and St Petersburg. My mind was opened up to the reality that the way life and society worked in my corner of North London was not necessarily the way it worked everywhere else. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to understand that at a young age.”

His love for languages and literature took him to Cambridge, where, from 2004–2008, he read Modern and Mediaeval Languages (Russian and French). The picture shows him on graduation day with his grandfather.

“After I graduated, the clear and defined path that I had been on through education suddenly came to an end. I wasn’t so much at a fork in the road as at a rake. I remember that feeling of not being entirely sure what a good next step would be, and also feeling like whatever path I took would define everything that happened thereafter. It’s interesting that we trap ourselves in these situations where we’re desperate to take action and move forward, and simultaneously frozen in the fear of the consequences – even if the impact of the decision is nowhere near as monumental as we make it feel in our heads and hearts.”

Eventually, he opted to start an online business with a close friend and, with the support of his parents, spent two years building it up. Then, as it suddenly dawned on the pair how much they would need to invest in marketing in order to generate significant revenue from the fledgling business, they realised that they both needed security and a proper salary.

He duly applied for a job with KidStart (the online shopping club that allows parents to save for their children as they shop), which was at that time a relatively new start-up. “Luckily I managed to convey some of that enthusiasm in my interviews, and I spent two great years at KidStart in a role that grew and expanded in lots of different directions, as did my confidence.”

Then came the break that would lead him eventually to his current position: “One of the founders at KidStart used to get invited to Shuffle, an event put on by what was then a small independent agency called Essence. He couldn’t make it one year and offered me his ticket.”

As the audience, who included many Essence staff, gathered at the upmarket venue — a Mayfair hotel – Veli says he remembers thinking that he would love to be part of this company. Six months later, following a “tough recruitment process” he was offered a job and, on starting with Essence in February 2013, he quickly found that his initial impression more than matched up to the reality: “In that first year, the agency I joined doubled in size around me and the excitement of being part of a growing, and successful, business was infectious.”

Towards the end of his first year, he was offered a role applying his industry knowledge and client experience in supporting the company. Although not without some hesitation – “there was, after all, growth for me on the client-facing side of things,” – he decided to take the plunge.

“Five years on, to say that I’m glad to have had the opportunity to move into ‘learning and development’ is an understatement. I’m proud of the work we do as a team and the impact we have on the business, and I’m excited about how we can do, and be, even better. The intellectual challenge of trying to build meaningful and effective learning experiences off and on the job is one that continues to motivate me, and is pertinent for every organisation.”

His personal and professional development has been incremental, although he recalls one “real growth spurt” when he and a colleague found themselves on the stage of a theatre facilitating a session on Essence’s new organisational operating model to the company’s entire New York office: “I was so far out of my comfort zone and went with it, appreciative of the fact that [she] and I got to do this crazy thing together.”

He has similar feelings about his time in Singapore: “Moving here with my wife, exploring a continent together… leading a team of smart and diverse people, learning from and working with a wide array of seasoned leaders have been all ‘the right kinds of challenging’.”

Among the lessons he has learned himself, he highlights:

• The importance as a leader of getting out of his team’s way. “When you’re surrounded by brilliant and smart people, you can waste a lot of time trying to show them that you’re even more brilliant and smart.”
• Finding good listeners who will resist the urge to fix your problems and will allow you to articulate your own thoughts, and thus to learn and to grow.
• Remembering in moments of self-doubt that you have felt like this before and “when you do, it usually means you’re on the verge of something amazing”.
• Stating your intentions, rather than hoping other people will guess what you mean.
• “If you’re unhappy with something or someone, no matter how sure you are that it’s all their fault, ask yourself on what level you might be creating this situation, and what you could do differently instead.”

Two Old Elizabethan friends have teamed up for the annual charity ‘jailbreak’ run by the Oxford University Student Union.

Conor Mellon (OE 2010-2017) and Rohan Radia (also 2010-2017) will be heading out of Oxford on 9th March and will then have 36 hours to get as far away from the city as they can without spending any money. Their purpose is to raise as much money as possible for the RAG (Raise and Give) charities.

On their fundraising page, the pair state: “We will be hitchhiking, charming, and busking (?!) our way on to boats, trains and planes in our effort to beat the other teams and escape from Oxford! Rohan will use his excellent interpersonal skills and awkward humour along the way and Conor will contribute rusty French, rudimentary German, and a healthy dose of positivity. We have never attempted anything like this before and are excited to give it a crack.”

Last year’s competitors reached such far-flung destinations as Sweden, Turkey and even Malaysia.
Jailbreak is one of the biggest fundraisers for the student union’s adopted charities. These currently include:

• Education Partnerships Africa, which works with schools in Uganda and Kenya, providing material resources and extra-curricular activities to help young students
• Aspire Oxford, a social enterprise that helps homeless and disadvantaged people in Oxford secure employment and housing
• The Porch, which helps Oxford’s homeless single and vulnerably housed adults towards more positive lifestyles
• IntoUniversity, which provides local learning centres supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds as they attain university places or pursue other aspirations.

“Ultimately we’re doing this to raise money for the fantastic charities that RAG supports,” the pair state. “100% of donations go to these charities…so please help them by donating! Thanks.”

Conor, who went to Lincoln College to read History and German, has been working for the university’s History Society this term and has invited young historians from QE along to hear outspoken historian David Starkey deliver a talk in March.

Rohan, who went to Oxford to study History and Economics at Somerville College, last year co-led a team of five students working to help the university’s Careers Service establish compliance with recycling policy.

In the previous academic year, Rohan had served on The Oxford Union’s Secretary’s Committee.

• To donate, go to https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/route7

The international migrant crisis in southern Europe may have faded from the headlines in recent months, but the humanitarian challenge remains, Old Elizabethan Nicholas Millet reminded QE boys when he returned to his alma mater.

Nick (OE 2001–2008) co-founded Refugee Education Chios, which provides education, support and training for teenagers and young adults living on the Greek island of Chios, which became a de facto detention centre after the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement.

The project offers safe places – a youth centre and a learning centre – outside the Vial detention camp, reaching up to 250 children and youth aged up to 22 each week. Both centres tailor their work to the refugees’ particular needs, with, for example, the learning centre offering a trauma-sensitive curriculum and the youth centre helping teenagers develop trusting relationships and confidence in their own abilities and skills.

He spoke to boys in the middle years of QE about the charity’s work and about the migrant crisis in general, highlighting the ongoing nature of the problem, which, he said, was all too easily forgotten.

Thanking him for his visit, Head of Academic Enrichment Nisha Mayer said afterwards: “Nick provided an enormously insightful and, at times, emotional talk, which was a good reminder of the importance of being involved with humanitarian causes.”

Nick first got involved in the refugee relief work before the 2016 agreement came into force. Inspired to take action to help refugees by a weekend visit to the ‘Jungle’ camp at Calais, he put his successful career as a management consultant on hold and flew to Chios, which lies just 7km off the mainland of Turkey.

The island was the arrival point for the highest number of refugees after Lesbos, with up to 1,500 men, women and children making the journey across the Aegean Sea every night at that time. During his talk, Nick showed the boys photographs of refugees arriving on Chios, often in perilously overloaded rubber dinghies. Other images revealed the poor conditions in the camp.

Nick, of Stanmore, has a history of involvement in humanitarian projects. Shortly after leaving QE, he spent time at the Sri Sathya Sai School – a village school in Kerala, India, which QE has supported since 2002. And, while he was reading for the Politics, Psychology and Sociology Tripos at Cambridge, he undertook research for the Grameen Bank, the Nobel Prize-winning microfinance organisation based in Bangladesh which works to help the poor.

On his most recent visit to QE, Nick mentioned especially the desperate plight of lone child refugees, telling the boys: “Children are sent because their parents can’t afford for the whole family to escape.”

New research highlights the success of grammar schools in sending large numbers of pupils from black and minority ethnic backgrounds to top universities.

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) study shows not only that students of all backgrounds are much more likely to progress to a top-tier university if they have been educated in an area with grammar schools, but that this is particularly true for those from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds.

Its publication comes as the magazine of King’s College, Cambridge, reports on Old Elizabethan George the Poet’s key role in the college’s first-ever open day for BME applicants. The magazine explains that although King’s accepts a relatively high number of state school pupils, it remains concerned about the ethnic diversity level among its student body.

Nationally renowned spoken-word performer and social commentator George Mpanga (OE 2002–2009), who himself attended King’s, led an empowerment session for the visiting prospective undergraduates. He told them how his time at Cambridge helped him understand the inner-city community he had come from, giving him an academically-based perspective which has informed his subsequent commentary on race, education and class.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “At Queen Elizabeth’s School, we are proud of our long-term success as an entirely meritocratic institution, and it is noteworthy that many of our leavers, such as George, who go on to Oxford and Cambridge are from modest backgrounds, often representing the first generation of their families to go into higher education. Nevertheless, we have made it one of our key priorities to do even more to ensure fair access and we are currently developing our outreach activities accordingly.”

The 60-page HEPI research paper, entitled The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education, was written by Iain Mansfield, a former senior civil servant at departments including the Department for Education. Its findings suggest that grammar schools can increase the likelihood of progression to the top third of higher education institutions (as defined by the Department for Education) for pupils from some traditionally disadvantaged groups, including pupils in the most disadvantaged two quintiles, namely social disadvantage and BME. In fact, it showed that the latter are more than five times as likely to progress to Oxbridge if they live in an area with selective schools than in a non-selective area, with England’s 163 grammar schools sending more BME students to Cambridge than all 1,849 non-selective state schools combined.

Commenting on the findings in the Times Educational Supplement, Mr Mansfield makes a plea for expanding grammar schools: “…for many disadvantaged students, grammar schools provide an unrivalled ladder of opportunity, offering them a route to elite higher education that is simply not systematically available to them elsewhere.”

He also tackles one frequent criticism of selective education head-on: “Did you know that that 45 per cent of pupils at grammar schools come from households with below-median incomes? Opponents of grammar schools like to portray them as only for the rich, but this statistic makes that claim demonstrably untrue. Yes, it’s true that grammar schools take a lower proportion of pupils on free school meals than one might expect – but the same is true of the most academically successful comprehensive schools, due to house-price selection.”

For his part, George Mpanga sought to inspire the visiting A-level students at King’s College, telling them: “I’m looking forward to seeing you guys in ten years and you saying to me: ‘Oh, remember that time in King’s? I was there!’ Because you will be someone, wherever you choose to go, you will be of consequence. I anticipate that; I look forward to that.”

He told them how his own time as an undergraduate had changed him: “When I went to Cambridge, I looked back at my community through binoculars and I could see it for what it is. That wouldn’t have been possible if I’d stayed in the environment. I would have become either consumed by my anger or completely disconnected with the social set-up, with the social scene.

“Being here gave me the space to look at it objectively and apply some of the disciplines of sociology, of the humanities, of the social sciences to what I saw growing up. It gave me that language. And what I found is, when I went back to that environment, everyone understood. No one looked at me funny because I’d gone to Cambridge.”

He recalled the occasion when the President of the African and Caribbean Society had persuaded him to give his first performance at Cambridge. “He was like, ‘You have to contribute. What? You’re just going to be here and you’re not going to give yourself? You’re not going to represent where you’re from in this place?’ And that pricked my conscience a little bit, so I agreed to do it.”

After qualifying as a GP, Dr Joseph Besser is now combining his practice of medicine with a passion for educating people about health – and enjoying married life in the sun in Australia.

Joe (OE 1997–2004) went on from QE to read Medicine at Nottingham. After graduating in 2009, he worked at some of the UK’s best-known hospitals, but also spent long periods in Australia, including 18 months in Melbourne as a junior doctor working in Accident & Emergency.

“Obtaining a medical degree permits you a great freedom to travel and work overseas,” he says. “I returned to London to complete GP training at St George’s in Tooting, and once completed, returned to Australia, this time to Sydney to work as a GP.

“I am now settling into life as a GP in Australia. I currently live and work in the Northern Beaches of Sydney in a beach town called Manly. I find myself on the beach almost every day. On the weekends, I spend my time playing as much beach volleyball as is humanly possible.”

His particular medical interests include psychiatry – he has worked both at The Priory and at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital – and innovations in general practice.

In 2018, he started a medical blog, Teach Me GP, and an article from it (What advice should we give to patients about their consultation?) was published in the British Journal on General Practice. “The year was full of accomplishments as I also passed my final GP exams and finished the year by getting married to my wife, Emma, who is also a doctor.”

“I hope some day to be a teacher, to emulate my favourite teachers from QE, Nottingham University and then St George’s Hospital in Tooting, those who have inspired me in the past. I am therefore undergoing training to become a GP trainer.” Joe also hopes one day “to promote better health education in primary and secondary schools. Our health is precious and yet we do not do enough to formally educate people on how to look after it.”

Those “favourite teachers” include Neil Enright, the current Headmaster, who was his Geography teacher through A-levels and who led a “memorable field trip” to Swanage.

“Although I stopped studying English after GCSE, I recall with great fondness classes with Mr [David] Ryan. I wish I had been lucky enough to live closer to the School so I could have remained in contact with more of the staff after leaving,” he adds.

Among his many other QE memories, the “lively” end-of-season rugby dinners stand out, as does the annual cross-country run, with its infamous ‘elephant dip’. “It was so wet and boggy that some unfortunate souls would lose the shoes right off their feet.”

“I made lifelong friends at QE. The best man at my wedding was a fellow lieutenant, Matt Houghton, and the old head boy [School Captain], Ashish Kalraiya, was an usher. Both were in my year.”

Scott Lesner switched careers after initially training as a lawyer – and has never looked back.

Now a recruitment specialist, Scott (OE 1987-1992) has carved out a successful career, while raising a family and maintaining his longstanding enthusiasm for football, as both player and fan.

“I didn’t love being a lawyer (and I think it’s really important to enjoy what you do at work), so I switched to legal recruitment,” he explains.

Scott joined QE in the middle of Year 8 in 1987. “I had some magnificent teachers,” he says, mentioning especially Eric Houston (who retired as Second Master in 2010 and is a Foundation Governor), History teacher Mr Oulton and Dr John Marincowitz (who went on to become Headmaster in 1999, retiring in 2011). “I didn’t just learn from them academically, but I was also moulded by them as a young man. I’m very conscious of that and grateful for it.”

Notwithstanding the School’s focus on rugby, football, including his beloved Spurs, has always been Scott’s passion: “I travelled an hour to school on the 107 bus from Kenton with a group of friends – mostly it was also a fun, social time. Once, after a particularly heated north London derby between Spurs and Arsenal, we were a bit rowdy on the bus and got in trouble for it at School.”

Such rare instances aside, he made a positive impression in both the classroom and on the sports field. “I won a number of academic prizes – if I remember rightly, for History and Latin – and I was good at sport. Cricket was my strongest and I think I played once for the First XI.”

A member of Stapylton House in an era when Stapylton was on a winning streak, he was also a prefect: “I still have my tie in a memories box.”

After A-levels in 1992, Scott progressed straight to Nottingham University to read Law and was then sponsored through Law school, training with the firm that is now CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang. “I spent a further two years there as an energy lawyer, advising clients on electricity market liberalisation and power projects.”

In 2000, he took the plunge and made his move into legal recruitment, joining Deacon Search, a firm that had been established only the year before. After a spell with another legal recruiter from 2005-2009, he returned to Deacon Search and has been there ever since.

“I’ve spent the last 18 years advising partners moving between the major UK and US law firms and conducting headhunting assignments. The highlights are always the team moves, as clients really appreciate those and, to be candid, they’re the big fees! It’s a fascinating business, as, being people-centric, no two situations are the same.”

On its website, the firm salutes him as its ‘search oracle’, highlighting his ‘photographic memory for partner moves (and for football trivia)’.

Scott adds: “Our company is doing well. We’re continuing to grow and we’re hopeful that 2019 will bring some significant international expansion.”

He is married to Katy and has three children: Jake, aged 14, Jasmine,12, and nine-year-old Max. The family live in Elstree.

A volunteer contributor at the School’s Careers Convention during the autumn, Scott remains close friends with one of his QE contemporaries – Adam Sherling (OE 1985-1992) – and is in contact occasionally with others, mostly via LinkedIn. “Recently, I exchanged messages with Khairul and Hisham Hussain for the first time in years.”

His passion for football is undimmed. “I still play five-a-side. I’m a season ticket-holder at Spurs with my dad, my sons, my cousin and some friends. I also manage my youngest boy’s Sunday league team,” he says.