Maryam: Hey, how’s it going, guys! Welcome back to the Extra Credit podcast.To those tuning in for the first time, this is a series where we speak to international students, graduates, and professors from around the world about the beauty of studying abroad.I’m Maryam, your host for today.If you’re a fan of Indiana Jones, The Mummy trilogy, and anything to do with the history of humankind, you’re going to want to listen to our special guest, Nurul Hamizah Afandi.Hamizah here is a museum curator at the Perbadanan Muzium Negeri Pahang in Malaysia. She visits museum galleries and archives, researches their collections of historic artefacts, and tailors different exhibitions and displays to attract new visitors to the museum. But before she got here, she was a curious archaeology and anthropology student at University College London (or UCL) in the UK. Welcome, Hamizah. We’re excited to have you here with us. How are you?Hamizah: I'm good. Thank you so much for having me here. It's truly an honour to be invited to speak on this podcast as well.Maryam: We’re glad to have you here as well. We're excited to learn more about, you know, what archaeology and anthropology is about. So alright, let's go back to the beginning before you started digging into bygone eras when you were just a senior high school student at Mara Junior Science College. Tell us, Hamiza, you were a math whiz who participated in the National Maths Olympiad. What suddenly inspired you to study archaeology? That's quite the switch in interest, isn't it?Hamizah: Alright. Yes, so, like you said, Mathematics has always been, I guess, one of my favorite subjects and, I guess, it's partly because I got the exposure from a very young age because my mom herself is a math teacher. So we've been, like say, my mom's teaching math for students who come over to our home to get, like, extra classes and things like that. So, I guess I can say that math was part of my life because I have this, like, huge family thing going around. But I guess, during my upper form of high school, at some point – we had to choose between taking biology or accounting for our SPM (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia) subjects. Like, you can't take both.So, it was at that point that I started thinking more deeply about life after school, like what I want to do, um, for my career and so on, because, well, it's not the end of the world of choosing like either biology or accounting, but then still, it somehow can probably limit or restrict your options afterwards. So, back then in school, we had to do this, ah, one test. It's called a RIASEC test and I did that quite a few times with – one of my aunts is a counselor so we did that together as well. So, it's one of those occupational personality type tests. So, every time I did the test, I got the same result. So, it basically stands for, I think, R-I-A-S-E-C stands for – was it realistic, investigative, artistic, social, entrepreneurship or something, and then conventional. So, I've always gotten the ‘I’ component very high, like, the – my marks for that component (were) very high. So, I guess I found out that I'm into careers with a very investigative nature of some sort.So, I guess it makes sense because Mathematics and Chemistry were two of my favorite subjects in school. And then they were like, with maths and chemistry, there's always, like, problems that we have to find solutions to and then you have questions that you have to find answers to. So, it's like, at the time, obviously you were not really like, familiar with research kind of thing, so I guess investigative is kind of like the best term to describe it. So, because of that, I tried to think harder about what (of) that has always interested me. So, I love watching crime documentaries. I love, reading crime, you know, books. In fact, one of my favorite novels is Sherlock Holmes. So it's during that time, I was like, okay, I think I'm into something related to, like, forensic science and something very, very research, very investigative of nature. So, um yeah, at that point, I was like, paying more attention to my interests: The books I read and, like, the movies I watched, to think about a career that I want to, like, go into. So, that's how it comes in the first place.Maryam: Interesting. I'm still wondering how, like, that ended up evolving into your interest in archaeology, because that's about, you know, studying what happened in the past, like civilisations from centuries or millennia ago. So, how did it get into that sort of, um, specialisation?Hamizah: Right, so, it started out as my personal interest in Forensic Science. So, basically, I was into, like, these crime documentaries and crime novels and stuff. So, I started planning to further my studies in Bachelors of Forensic Science or something related to that. But then, because I got a scholarship after SPM – so, I secured a scholarship by Yayasan Khazanah. But then, the one that they ...
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