Ayimire Aihemaiti

I’m a Uyghur minority from Xinjiang, China — outgoing and passionate about sport and cooking (friends often get treated to traditional Xinjiang dishes!). While studying at Beijing Jiaotong University, I learned about the University of Birmingham through an inter-university partnership. I applied before graduation and was delighted to join the MSc Cyber Security programme, becoming the only Chinese girl in my cohort. I truly hope more women will choose careers in cybersecurity.

Birmingham exceeded my expectations. From Welcome Week onwards you can feel the campus energy and warmth: friendly staff, monthly markets, and festive events that make the campus feel like a theme park. Every building offers great study spaces for both group work and quiet focus. The gym and its classes were a highlight for me — by training consistently over the year I lost about 10 kg and found like-minded friends through sport.

Academically, the programme opened the door to cybersecurity: Term 1 built foundations in cryptography and secure systems and showed how organisations approach security assessment; Term 2 focused on practical, team-based learning in fuzzing, penetration testing, reverse engineering, and malware analysis; and in Term 3 my dissertation helped me grow from “interested” to a confident, practice-oriented professional.

For future students: choose projects you genuinely love, take part in activities and be sociable, connect with the Careers Network early, and make full use of the university’s rich resources — the libraries and study spaces, academic competitions, and cultural venues such as the art gallery and botanical gardens. On this beautiful campus, you’ll gain solid skills, dependable friends, and unforgettable memories.