'I swapped student life in the UK for Caribbean island - and saved myself £88k in tuition fees'
A student has moved to a Caribbean island for university - saving herself £88k in tuition fees in the process. Tamara Leslie, 20, started a biomedical course at the University of Sussex but quit after a week - when she discovered she could get the same qualification for less.
The student, who is originally from Papua New Guinea but has been living in Eastbourne, East Sussex, would have forked out £16k-a-year in tuition fees in the UK as an international student. She would have spent £128k on a three-year undergraduate degree and a further five years in medicine - as she did not initially get into medical school.
She looked into other options and realised she could study medicine on a five-year course at New Anglia University, Anguilla - costing roughly £8,000 a year. Tamara is currently doing a year on a pre-med course before a four-year medical degree.
She packed up her life to move 4,220 miles and loves the "freedom" and "independence" it has given her. Tamara said: 'You have those moments where you just think about your whole life and you plan everything.
'All my friends are going to finish university and I'll still be there. I understand medicine is an arduous course but I thought that surely there must be another way to get this done a bit quicker. Ultimately the money and the time and everything coming to New Anglia just won me over."
Tamara had to pay more for her tuition fees in the UK as she is not a UK citizen. As she did not get accepted onto a medicine course initially, she was completing a three-year undergraduate course in biomedical science first.
She said: "I was a permanent resident in England at the time but I wasn't a citizen so obviously it wouldn't have applied to me to have normal tuition fees as a home student."
But Tamara quickly worked out the course was not for her in September 2024. She said: 'Class size is definitely a big influence on it. In my classes in Brighton it felt like it was 100 to 150 of us. I couldn't really raise my hand because I felt I would waste other students' time so everyone just keeps quiet."
Tamara contacted SME, Study Medicine Europe, and went through various university options with an agent after starting at Sussex. She said: "She gave me all these options of European universities to start next September, but this was the only option to start early in January.
'I submitted my application, and I think I got accepted the next day, so I dropped out of university and then I came here."
Tamara said the Caribbean appealed because of the " weather and location". She said: "It reminded me of my home country. It kind of felt familiar to me.
"I think your environment influences you a lot, so it would be helpful for me to be somewhere nice and sunny rather than somewhere just cold."
The degree will be recognised everywhere as it meets the GMC criteria - a set of standards for those who train to become doctors. To start with she was the only person on her pre-med course, which allows her to experience 'a more personal relationship with your teacher'.
Despite having no family in the Caribbean, the people there have made her feel welcome and a part of the community. Tamara said: 'Every time you walk into stores everyone says good morning.
"It's just so cheery and happy. I feel like that's why I didn't get a chance to be homesick - because it didn't take me too long to connect with people.
'When I travelled to the UK for the first time as a kid, people were a bit closed off and it took me a while to make friends. Here, time isn't a factor - you can click with someone immediately.'
Tamara pays "roughly the same" same for her student accommodation but gets more bang for her buck. She pays $500 a month for rent.
She said: "I remember looking at accommodation when I was going to Sussex and the cheapest was roughly £400 per month. With the money I'm paying here I definitely wouldn't be able to get this with whatever I would have paid in the UK.
"Here we've got a balcony, an outdoor sofa, a living room. It's crazy. It's also roughly about a six minute drive to campus."
She has a part-time job working at a beach bar, which helps her fund daily expenses in Anguilla. Because her course is aimed at her getting her qualifications as quickly as possible, her timetable is 8am to 3pm every week day - instead of having lectures spread out like it is in the UK.
She said: 'It can get hard sometimes in the sense that school can get quite tasking but I think it all depends on how you manage your time. I've been balancing it pretty well so far.'
Tamara plans to complete her final two years of her course in the UK to do her clinical rotations, as New Anglia University offers these in the UK. She said: 'It's worth my money to be here, but when it comes to it, I'd rather shadow the NHS because the healthcare here is a bit slow.
'I think we, as humans, get so stuck in a cycle which we're so used to, but I think it's best to go out of your shell because it's the best way to grow as an individual. My biggest advice is to go for it.'
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I checked my notes from 1988 and sure enough, I had watched and photographed Leonie, then aged seven, playing with Maggie, two years her junior, while their adult male cagemate, Sibu, lay in a heap and gave exaggerated yawns at the public. My notes recorded that Leonie threw excrement at one noisy school party and begged for food from another group. Maggie tasted a damp patch on the concrete floor – there appeared to be no food or water freely available and the only enrichment was a swinging tyre. As well as noisy children their soundscape included a children's ride that played Fur Elise electronically.I have a lasting memory of Leonie as I left, face against the glass of her indoor quarters, a picture of boredom isolation and sensory deprivation compared to a life in the complex ecosystem in which orangutan species evolved to play a role as a keystone species. The thought of her being locked up for four decades is painful. I don't doubt that the keepers and public cared deeply for her but her every move, every decision – what to eat, where to sleep, with whom she could mate - was taken for her by humans. For an intelligent autonomous being it wasn't much of a life and unless more zoos begin rewilding the captives in their care, that is the prospect for each infant ape born in a zoo. If they survive into adulthood, they face 40, 50 or even 60 years of concrete and steel indoors, and an exercise yard with at best some grass and a climbing frame, but gazed upon constantly by crowds of humans. According to online sources, Leonie had one infant, a son named Carl, now in Barcelona Zoo, and acted as a surrogate mother to Mujur, still in Dublin. On the face of it, for a female ape to give birth is a wonderful thing and incomparable in terms of environmental enrichment for the mother. But unless the breeding is part of a rewilding programme, reintroducing the species into suitable habitat within its historical range to restore its role as a keystone species to forests depleted of apes, then the question has to be asked: is it moral to encourage breeding for a lifetime in captivity? About 10 years ago, a video of Leonie rescuing a bird from a lake went viral, demonstrating her innate compassion. As more and more zoo visitors record interesting snippets of ape behaviour on their smartphones and post them on social media, more and more people are being surprised by the self-evident level of ape cognition. The time is long overdue for a re-evaluation of the ethics of imprisoning apes (and other sentient, self-aware social animals) for zoos to provide a fun day out for the kids. I hope this new report on apes in UK zoos will trigger such a public debate.
