REAL PHOTO OF ANGELLO
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Angello
Angello is an MEng Civil Engineering student at UCL, independent Maths tutor and the creator behind angz!—sharing the honest side of engineering, university and studying.
He built ANGINEERING to make the early research stage feel clearer: real course routes, useful questions and a student perspective without the prospectus gloss.
As and A*s across Maths, Further Maths & PhysicsA-Level background
80%+ in dissertation workPerson–infrastructure interaction in urban regeneration
4/5 university offersUCL, King’s, Queen Mary & City
Imperial College LondonReached interview stage
“A degree should be something you can genuinely see yourself enjoying—not something you choose because it sounds impressive or feels like the ‘right’ answer.”
FIG. 08.5 — MY STORY
I’m still working mine out too.
I did not grow up with a perfect roadmap. I grew up learning, getting things wrong, and realising that potential only matters when you decide to use it.
01 / GROWING UP
Before I took myself seriously.
I grew up in a Tamil, South Asian household in the heart of South East London. We were not the richest family, life around me was not always the quietest or easiest place to grow through, and I was not handed a perfect roadmap. A lot of what shaped me, I learnt the hard way.
I moved from a very different secondary-school environment to a grammar school in Year 9. I brought a lot of my old habits with me. Through the GCSE and COVID period, I cared too much about fitting in, short-term validation and how people saw me.
My environment had changed, but my mindset hadn’t caught up with it.
By GCSEs I had become increasingly unserious about school. I remember failing Foundation French and being laughed at. I laughed too. Being the person people laughed with almost became its own form of validation, instead of a reason to ask more of myself.
Year 12 was the wake-up call. Physics was the subject I found most difficult, but Further Maths became the bigger mental barrier. I was consistently one of the lowest performers in class tests; someone had already dropped it and I felt people looking at me like I was next. Eventually, I started thinking it too. It stopped feeling like something I was struggling with and started feeling like something I simply could not do.
03 / FINDING BALANCE
Taking life seriously without losing myself.
After becoming academically serious, I sometimes swung too far the other way and treated academics as though they had to come before everything. I do not tell this story to say you should lock yourself away and revise. You can have friends, go out, laugh, create things, make memories and enjoy being young—while still being academically cold when it is time to perform. I did not need to lose my personality. I needed to learn when to have fun and when to take myself seriously.
Today, I study Civil Engineering at UCL on an integrated Master’s (MEng) programme. I am proud of how far I have come, but I have not “made it”—not even close. I am still figuring out my career, what I want from life, who I am becoming, and making mistakes as I go. Academic success can open doors, but it does not answer every question about life.
04 / BUILDING SOMETHING USEFUL
The kind of guidance I wish I had.
Looking back, I wish I had an older-brother-type figure a few steps ahead: not someone to decide my future or pretend to have everything figured out, just someone relatable with perspective. Sometimes I did not need another person telling me to “work hard”. I needed someone to explain an opportunity, tell me when I was wasting my potential, or remind me that one bad result was not the end of my life.
That is part of why I made angz!—a space for university, academics, student life, humour, mistakes and uncertainty, communicated like an actual student rather than somebody pretending to have life solved. ANGINEERING grew from the same idea: helping people understand Engineering and their options a little more clearly, ask better questions and feel less lost.
Maybe I’m capable of more than I realise.
ANGINEERING will not decide your future or pretend there is one perfect path. It is me trying to use what I have learnt—and what I am still learning—to make somebody else’s journey a little clearer. If it helps even one person understand Engineering better, discover an opportunity or make a more informed decision, it was worth building. Maybe they pass something on to a friend. Maybe they do not. That is okay.