The Blueprint.

We had some help.

This footage takes me back a few years. Picture a Norwegian exchange student of sorts, hailing from Oslo, mastering London-living during the depths of COVID-19. I was stressing through final exams while simultaneously building an enterprise ecosystem from the ground up — a tough ask, even with the friends I'd pulled in alongside me. Mastering UK-life meant meeting wildly different people; some turned out to be lifelong partners (in crime). We launched our projects. The rest is history, the future, and the very moment you're reading this now. We were invisible — or so we thought — quietly breaking through in a global market before our life-experience had even caught up. That was the iconic brilliance of it all.

And then Queen Mary shifted their gaze toward us. Surreal is the word. An institution known for its prestige and reach choosing to fund what was, at the time, a very small business. Not only that — 1-on-1 support, guidance across multiple courses, continuous backing from multiple departments both privately and publicly. The morale boost arrived right as deadlines were brewing and the cost of living was ever-soaring. Then came the curveball: my team and I were asked to feature in a marketing campaign for the university itself. You couldn't make this up. Barely 20-year-old kids already getting recognition from up high. Credit where credit is due — the vision would not have survived without their octagonal stamp of approval.

The story closes with me completing my exams with First Class Honours, graduating, and watching myself represented on-screen. The diversity, the age-relatability, the entrepreneurial dream — all of it embodied in one blast from the past. The dream was always there, but vision was needed, and Queen Mary's Careers Team provided that at a critical inflection point in my life. What QMUL built in 2022, I'm still building on. Grateful is an understatement.