‘I challenge people to think about how they can climb’

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“I did a bachelor’s at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and now I’m in the first year of my master’s in Complex Systems Engineering and Management. A few years ago, I was a member of the youth council of the Equal Opportunities Alliance at the Ministry of Education. They created this council to deal with the problem of inequality in education. I was part of it with several other young people and we got a lot of information about the situation. Then they asked us to think of our own initiative to try and tackle the problem.

I was doing my bachelor’s and wondered how it would look on my LinkedIn profile if I put my master’s on there. I knew I would have to wait two years to put it there and then I thought, what if I just do it to see how it looks and imagine it on my CV. It’s like visualising your future.

Growing up, I had the advantage of having a mother who had a university degree from Turkey. She was the first generation in her family to go to university. My father was able to support me financially to pay for some extra schooling and those things helped me to get a higher advice for secondary school. I think I am fortunate that I had a good way through the school system to reach my potential. Not everyone has the same background or the same parents.

I was born and raised here, but I still had to learn the system, like what is MAVO, HAVO, and VWO. People sometimes don’t know how the system works and that has a lot of influence on your schooling. If a teacher sees that your mother is a cleaner and your father works in a factory, they could have the prejudice of thinking this child might not do well and they might not challenge a student like that too much in class. But if the child has a parent that is a doctor or lawyer, they might challenge them more. You expect more from them and that also influences someone’s potential.

Research shows that if your parents have a lower economic social status, you don’t have much contact with your parents. Maybe your parents work a lot and there is no time to talk about things like school at the dinner table. Or maybe your parents aren’t available to read stories to you before bed, or take you to museums, or social activities. Those things also have an impact. People with a higher social status or more money let their kids explore the world more.

I want to help young people think about their futures

My idea is called Dream CV, and I give workshops to young people in secondary school as well as MBO (vocational training schools). I ask the students to fill in a questionnaire and they can tell me about their goals. I want to help young people think about their futures, what their ambitions are. Whatever those goals are, we then try to look at concrete steps to get there by envisioning their dream CV. For example, say they’re studying to be a caregiver at MBO and they want to become a lawyer, I ask them if they know the steps to get there. Many people don’t know, they just ended up there because they had to choose something but there was not much planning. I challenge people to think about how they can climb. For me, this project is about giving back.

I use a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger very often that says something like you can have a good ship with the best captain in the world but if you don’t have a roadmap or don’t know where to go you will drift around forever. In this case, you can have a lot of potential but you don’t know what to do and that’s a loss for you, for the economy, and for society. It’s to everyone’s advantage that people reach their full potential.

I did several pilot workshops with students at MBOs in Rotterdam but I would like to develop this idea further. I was nominated for the Young Impact Award (in Dutch) which is sponsored by ABN AMRO. They have said they want to offer me support and advice even if I don’t win. There is a lot of interest from other organisations asking to do something together so I really want to explore and expand the initiative further.

A lot of opportunities are coming my way and my studies are really general so I could go in a lot of directions, but I want to do something with the public, with society. That could mean working at a ministry or something like that. I want to use my engineering skills to work on real social and political challenges.”

• Voting (in Dutch) for the Young Impact Award is open until 1 November. The winner will be announced on 10 November and will receive EUR 2,500 to further develop their initiative.

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Heather Montague / Freelance writer