Alexandra Bulat is a 24-year-old PhD candidate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College of London. In 2017 she started volunteering for the largest European organisation @the3million, campaigning to protect citizens rights after Brexit.

She is Romanian and came to the UK for the first time in 1997 when she was three-years-old. At the time, her father was training to be a doctor and was invited to meet with NHS doctors to discuss their experiences. They stayed in the UK for a few months but returned to Romania after her father’s work permit expired and his contract didn’t renew.

I asked Alexandra if she had memories of these months of her early life:

“I remember when my family left back to Romania, my mom bought this cake for the me and the others kids, and she actually didn’t tell me we were going back permanently to Romania, they just said to me ‘well the term ended’ and I told the other kids: ‘I’ll be back in the autumn’ and I was back in the autumn...but I was back in the autumn fifteen years later.”

©Antonio Zazueta

In 2012, Alexandra began studying Sociology and Media at the University of Sussex.

She told me about her struggles when she arrived in the UK. The first months were challenging and the language barrier was a big part of it. She found it hard to understand or take part in conversations with her English friends. Despite her first - early- experience with the weather in the UK, she remember being surprised by the cold windy days of Brighton. The pub culture was also a cultural shock, but that wasn’t her biggest struggle…

“My first project on migration was when I was in second year, during the summer, on a research project about British attitudes toward Romanians. What inspired me to apply to do this small research project at Sussex University was actually reading all those headlines, I was seeing all those headlines about "Romanians coming to steal the jobs", "coming to take the benefits" at the same time, a lot of negative stereotypes. And I thought "I would like to speak to British people from different backgrounds, to see what they think, and how they react to some of those headlines".”

Her idea of doing some qualitative research on migration developed, Alexandra did her final dissertation on “Media representation of Romanians”, and then did her MPhil dissertation at Cambridge from a different perspective: “Double standards? Romanians’ attitudes towards the British, co-nationals and other minorities in the UK”

After her Masters, she decided to base her PhD on 'Making sense of attitudes towards EU migration in the UK: British, Romanian and Polish voices in Newham and Tendring.'

She articulates her experience of being Romanian in the UK in the following video.