Sarah Williams-Shealy: An Intellectual Choking Hazard

I felt the cold nighttime air brush against my face as the sound of students walking down the cobblestone street rang in my ears. My shoes were cutting into my feet, it was raining, humid, and I had no umbrella. I was walking in this miserable parade along with eight other Cambridge undergraduate students, who had rightfully planned ahead, and who all had umbrellas on them. 

“You can pop under my umbrella, if you want,” said one of the girls.

I leaned with her under the large, black, umbrella. Regrettably, it still did not cover me or shield me and later on when I realized that my hair got tangled and caught in one of the jagged edges of the umbrella, I wished I had kept walking in the rain. Little did I know I was about to step into one of the strangest cultures I would ever experience. A culture that to this day, I’m still not fully sure I understand. 

Sarah in front of King's College in Cambridge.

I walked past one of the many gates that separate the esteemed world of Cambridge from the outside world and into Emmanuel College, part of the University of Cambridge. I blended in with the rest of the undergraduates going to the formal, donning a traditional Cambridge gown and an adequate dress, but I soon realized that I was very different from the people in my group.

While we stood in the courtyard waiting on others to join us, the girl who previously lent me her umbrella began inquiring about where I was from. When she realized that I was only an international student studying at Anglia Ruskin who was from a university she had never heard of in the Southern United States, she immediately stopped talking to me.

She even made fun of me for the rest of the evening.

At that point, I was feeling really low. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that perhaps the decision to study in Cambridge was a bad idea and that perhaps I never should have pushed myself to go outside of my comfort zone. 

Sarah at a formal at Churchill College.

I felt awkward standing alone after being brushed off and watching everyone else who were all having a great time chatting with each other. That’s when a woman walked into the college, wearing a nice blouse and blue jeans. Based on her casual attire, I assumed she was a student’s family member or guest, until she started approaching our group and everyone got excited all at once.

It became apparent that this was the special guest who we were waiting on— a New York Times bestselling author, a prominent novelist, an esteemed lecturer, and a Cambridge PhD. I hung back while all the undergraduates swarmed her with questions and asked for her autograph and then we slowly made our way to the dining hall.

As we took our seats, I ended up being one of the last ones to sit down and consequently ended up sitting right next to our esteemed guest. At this point, I was very bummed out and wasn’t expecting to get anything decent out of the already spoiled evening. Then, she turned and started making conversation with me.

After general introductions and greetings, she also, like the girl with the umbrella from earlier in the evening, began inquiring about where I was from and how I ended up sitting next to her at this table full of people on a humid April night. While I was fully expecting her to withdraw when I explained that I was studying at Anglia Ruskin and that I was from a small university in South Carolina, her eyes lit up instead. 

Sarah standing in front of the Mathematical Bridge in Cambridge.

“I actually lived in North Carolina for five years,” she said. “I enjoyed visiting South Carolina, very much, especially the Charleston area.”

She started asking me about what made me want to study in Cambridge and asked what made me want to go into education. I told her that I wanted to put myself outside of my comfort zone, but that I thought the most important reason I picked Cambridge was so that I would have the experience of living in an intellectual city and learning about another country’s education system through the English Language Teaching program that I was a part of at Anglia Ruskin. She applauded that logic and assumed that I must have felt very out of place in a spot like Emmanuel, as she acknowledged that the Cambridge culture isn’t very welcoming to outsiders.

We spent a solid half-hour talking about education on an international scale and she highlighted something that I had not often considered in my academic career— that the educational problems that I was looking to combat in my profession were issues that were not exclusive to only Western society, the same problems were occurring all over the world. Teacher shortages, inadequate standards, poor accountability, and a lack of funding were common issues faced by many educational systems, not just by the United Kingdom and the United States.

After inquiring about how much these issues meant to me and how I wanted to use my profession to somehow address these problems, she suggested that I look into completing a graduate degree where I could make issues in minority education my emphasis. After doing further research in the field, I’ve come to realize that it’s exactly what I want to focus on in my future profession and the enlightening discussion I had with her that evening only confirmed that I had chosen the right career path for me.

Sarah exploring the River Cam with her good friend, Matthew.

We were both talking so much that we had only eaten half of the food on our plates mid-way through the hour-long meal. She picked up a green bean with her fork and continued on with the discussion, but stopped mid-sentence and went silent. At first, I thought she was just pausing to chew.

It became apparent soon after that she was choking when she started making motions at her throat and coughing.

So, what do you do when a New York Times bestselling author is choking right next to you? You embarrass yourself in front of an entire dining hall filled with people and whack the medical student, who’s been trained in CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, with a bread roll from across the table to get his attention.

At this point, everyone at the table was panicking and I was trying to hand her a glass of water. She took several sips to try to dislodge the green bean from her throat and after a few minutes of coughing, she was fine again.

Sarah enjoying the beautiful greenery at the back of King's College.

The dinner resumed and everyone went back to chatting casually, but neither one of us had the chance to eat more than half of the courses because we talked so much. By the end of the evening, she told me how lovely it had been getting to know me, how much she enjoyed our conversation, and gave me her contact information. Knowing that she’s had conversations with lots of interesting individuals, I was really flattered.

Cambridge taught me that sometimes when you push yourself out of your comfort zone to live in the city where the DNA helix was discovered, the city where Stephen Hawking lived, and the city where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath fell in love, you’ll find that green beans are a choking hazard and that even if you feel incredibly out of place walking in the footsteps of so many brilliant minds, that you might just be heading exactly where you were meant to be.




Sarah Williams-Shealy is a junior English, Secondary Education major who plans to graduate from Lander University in 2020. She studied at Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge from January-May in the spring of 2018. Upon graduating, Sarah hopes to teach high school English in a South Carolina classroom and to obtain her master's degree in an education-related field.