Farewell to Poland

School expo at the beautiful Technical University Warsaw

We're leaving Poland today, it's time to go back to work in High Wycombe to get ready to welcome our new animation and visual effects students, who start with us in just ten days. It's been huge fun talking to students here about the opportunities available to study overseas. Poland has almost 100 secondary schools with a specialism in the visual arts - a benevolent legacy of the Communist era and something that is quite unknown in the UK, where the visual arts barely gets a mention at many secondary schools, and is almost never given the same classroom time as the sciences, languages and the humanities.

What is Studia w Anglii?

Janusz Dargiewicz ("Yanoosh Dargyayvitch") is a Polish educator who founded Studia w Anglii (“Stoodiavangly”) in 2006 to help and encourage Polish students to have the opportunity to study in Britain. Since then, he has helped over 500 students from all over Poland to make the journey to enroll at universities in the UK, most notably here at Bucks. We caught up with him in Poland and asked him to talk about Studia w Anglii and how it all works.

Bucks New University Animation & VFX Goes to Poland

Bydgoszcz ("Bidgosh"). Image: Wikipedia

This week I am touring schools with a specialism in art and design in Poland, talking to students about the possibility of studying in the UK. There are many schools and colleges in Poland which train students in the visual arts, and many talented students who probably don't realise what a great career they could have in digital media. The animation and visual effects industry is not yet well developed in Poland, but it is a growing industry, and Students from Poland have the right to work anywhere in the EU, including the UK.

Bucks New University's Polish Connection

Characters in Polish national dress by Monika Dzikowicz

Some of our most talented recent graduates in recent years from the Animation, Games and Interactive Media course here at Bucks have been from Poland. We are not sure why there has been a strong Polish presence here in High Wycombe but, whatever the reason, it is a connection that we are proud of and want to encourage in future.

Students from overseas help to give our course a more international and cosmopolitan flavour. In addition, many of our foreign students are highly motivated to squeeze everything they can from their experience at University, working hard out of hours and during the holidays to make the best use of their time here. Our students from Poland have been no exception, and they have done some of the best work to come out of our department in recent years.