she's such an oversharer. who in their right mind feels the need to post a 
I QUIT MY JOB post. it sounds like a meme
I QUIT MY JOB post. it sounds like a meme
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omg.... her first job out of university isn't her dream job?? surprise surprise!! also "the office-based world of work isn't something I enjoy" she's so special for not wanting to do a 9-5 office job, such a free spirit <333 honestly I think she should have stuck with it, I also believe that quitting and starting again can be a good and healthy choice but hasn't it been only a few months? it's also never a bad idea to give it more time
also did you guys watch the video she did with jade, I can't bring myself to watch it because everything about Jade makes me cringe at this point
also did you guys watch the video she did with jade, I can't bring myself to watch it because everything about Jade makes me cringe at this point
I get the sense she was being asked to do things she thought were below her being new to the team and early in her career like general admin and support stuff that you get asked to do in an office environment and she suddenly decided it wasn’t for her.
I wonder if part of it is that in her job, she's just like anyone else - she's not going to be praised for being exceptional and special everyday. A normal office job that anyone could do? No thanks.
Well she's up for quite a disappointment in the real world. She's annoying and tragically mediocre.
Exactly. It comes across that she thinks she should be at the top of the tree straight away...
Also if it was 3 days a week and she was only there a few months that probably means she only did double digit number of days there, when you enter a new job there's always that training period/ settling period, especially when fresh out of university. You have to give it time!
I'm sorry, but how can her expectations of this job (travelling around the world and helping school communities) be SO far away from reality. I mean she probably had an interview where all of this was discussed, and she signed the papers, aware of what she can expect from this job. Also, they are not gonna send you on a business trip if you've only just started working there lol what was she thinking. There is an onboarding/introductory period at almost every office job that can take from weeks to months. You gotta get through it.
And people congratulating her under her insta post makes me feel really weird. Why are they proud of her? Because she couldn't last 2 months at her "dream job"? This is ridiculous at this point.
Btw, does anyone know why she mentions a gap year? It doesn't make sense to me, she already has her master's degree. Taking a break before starting to work doesn't make sense either as she was working until now.
And people congratulating her under her insta post makes me feel really weird. Why are they proud of her? Because she couldn't last 2 months at her "dream job"? This is ridiculous at this point.
Btw, does anyone know why she mentions a gap year? It doesn't make sense to me, she already has her master's degree. Taking a break before starting to work doesn't make sense either as she was working until now.
Malala posted some pictures of her Oxford graduation, Vee is in one of the pictures and she didn't tag her, but she tagged her other friend that's in the pic
Now I’m very new to Vee and I don’t watch her videos often. However I do find her essay crisis videos helpful to get motivated. But as I watch these videos I realised how poorly they reflect on her?? If I was an employer I would not want to hire if I saw these videos. Considering she’s studying classics she is not very articulate?? I don’t know maybe that is just me
She was a bit like Jack in that way - he posted multiple videos 'boasting' about writing his dissertation in 1 week, and writing essays the night before they're due. That's not very appealing to future employers if that's their work ethic.
In most cases I believe they'd already done all the preliminary work. So just compiling all the information in one night or one week isn't really that impressive since they weren't starting from scratch.
What should we make of this? In The Times on Saturday (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-vee-kativhu-the-youtuber-who-makes-studying-cool-vvlfxj2qs (original article behind paywall))
Meet Vee Kativhu, the YouTuber who makes studying cool
When she came to Britain aged five, she couldn’t speak English. At school she was told ‘people like us’ don’t go to Oxford. She did. Now, Vee Kativhu is best friends with Malala and her videos are helping students to aim high
Like many of her wealthier peers at Oxford University, Vee Kativhu had spent time in her teens doing invaluable work experience at a sleek, internationally renowned blue-chip company. But while her fellow students were exploring executive suites and tracking share index prices in shiny HQs, for Kativhu it was exploring deep-fat fryers and touchscreen tills working behind a counter at McDonald’s in Birmingham. Her wages paid for the bus pass she needed to get to school.
It was at McDonald’s, she says, that she gained some of her most valuable life experience: how to problem-solve, how to read people, how to de-escalate situations and how to manage high stress, such as spending her evening selling Happy Meals and the entire night doing her homework. She was 17, academically driven, and it was while serving fries to some school friend or other who could afford not to work in their spare time that she experienced one of those realisations too uncomfortable to qualify as a lightbulb moment exactly: this juxtaposition between poor and rich, or certainly between poor and richer, felt uncannily like a glimpse into the future. There seemed to be a kind of illogical permanence to her situation.
And the same thing seemed to be playing out at school. Kativhu had arrived in Britain from Zimbabwe at the age of five, barely speaking English and, although she was by then outperforming other students, in the mind’s eyes of her teachers her background determined her future and she defaulted to the “unlikely to do well” category. Her mother had always encouraged her to aim high, so Kativhu was crushed when a teacher told her: “Oxford isn’t for people like us.”
Kativhu is now 23. She has recently moved into her first London apartment, as sleek as those executive suites. She pays for it herself, with money to spare. If you’re wondering how she achieved all this at such a young age yet your heart sinks at the thought of, say, watching a 13-minute video on the secret to exam revision, you’re unlikely ever to have spotted the niche that she did. When she put the revision video on YouTube – starring herself as its guinea pig – it became, at least among fellow bookworms, a sensation.
With Malala Yousafzai on her wedding day – the two became friends at Oxford University
VEEKATIVHU/INSTAGRAM
In her academic ambitions, Kativhu had always been an anomaly among her friends, but on the internet she found thousands of young people like her – girls, boys, young women and men who longed to go to the best universities but were surrounded by people who told them they couldn’t: teachers like hers, friends with different interests, parents who either couldn’t afford university fees or who wanted to see particularly their girls settle on a more culturally traditional path of marriage and children. “People typically get picked on for liking to study. It’s not so much about coolness, but more about, ‘There’s no one else here like me.’ ” Her life goal is making education available to all girls. Also: “I want to dismantle what intelligence looks like.”
Online, Kativhu is a rapturous and enthusiastic ball of energy. The word her followers most often use to describe her is “inspirational”. In real life, she is softer but still a warm and determined presence. She followed up the exams video with other hits: “How to write an amazing personal statement for any university application”, “How to stop being a lazy student”, “How to deal with self-doubt and imposter syndrome” and – after she went on to get a place at Harvard – “How I got into Oxford AND Harvard by the age of 21”. She keeps Nobel prize-winning company. When she started at Oxford, she discovered Malala Yousafzai living next door. “We both get it. She’d run off to do some amazing talk and then come back to a lecture. I’d catch a train to London to go do a YouTube talk. And then we just had breakfast every single day.”
She and Yousafzai are now close friends. Earlier this month she was one of a handful of guests at Yousafzai’s wedding, tweeting: “What a special day today was; witnessing Mal & my brand new brother-in-law become partners for life.” It was backstage at one of Yousafzai’s speaking engagements that Kativhu met Michelle Obama. “I just love her unapologetic nature. And I love how she is who she is – you would never, ever call her ‘Barack Obama’s wife’. In that moment, speaking to her, I felt like, ‘I can do anything.’ ” Vlogs Kativhu has shot since – “I read every book Michelle Obama recommended and now I’m becoming a new woman”, “Carving pumpkins with Malala and discussing global change” – have attracted thousands more viewers.
The suggested content that YouTube’s algorithm throws up once you’ve watched one of Kativhu’s videos gives the impression that the world she inhabits is still pretty grounded: another “study-tuber” confessing “My toxic relationship with productivity”, or videos showing “British high-schoolers taking Korea’s SAT English exam” and “Posh kids go to state school. School swap: the class divide”.
If she had a job title, it would be something like academic influencer and education activist. Kativhu’s is a unique proposition online: using her own experiences, she wants to challenge the correlation in many people’s minds between privilege and intelligence. Alongside the vlogs and the speaking engagements, she has this month given up her office job to publish a book, Empowered, an advice guide to all manner of young people but particularly those from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds such as her own.
With Michelle Obama, April 2019
VEEKATIVHU/INSTAGRAM
Her route to university was hard won, secured through her own research. “There was a course that was happening at Lady Margaret Hall, at Oxford University, called the Foundation Year. The programme was aimed at students who wanted to attend a place like Oxford but felt that, because of external barriers, they couldn’t.” Having completed the programme, she was the first black student to be accepted as an undergraduate from the course. Her chosen subject was classical archaeology and ancient history.
At Oxford she became more and more aware of a disconnect, in and outside the lecture hall: “My school friends thought that they weren’t an Oxford type of student because they thought they had to be superwealthy, go horse riding, wear clothes that cost thousands, be Prince Harry or something.” Meanwhile at college: “You’d have a tutor asking students things like, ‘What did you feel walking around the Temple of Athena?’ and I’d be thinking, ‘Wow, can we start at the fact that not everybody has been to Greece and visited a temple. Not all families go on cultural holidays every year.’ I’d be saying, ‘Guys, I haven’t been to Egypt yet. I haven’t been to Rome. Not everybody’s done this before.’ ”
She says that the friends she made at university with privileged backgrounds “were very aware of that privilege, but I think I was unaware of my lack of it because it’s all I ever knew. So meeting them and realising what they’d had, I was like, whoa, I couldn’t believe it… My university friends were shocked about the world I was coming from, because they just couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re telling me you’re in a class of 30 people – how does your teacher teach? It doesn’t make sense.’ ”
This sense of division came to the fore while writing her book, she says. “Yeah, that was a difficult moment. I cried. I stopped writing for the day because it was suddenly right there, so clear. I remembered talking to my school friends, saying, ‘Right, guys, the teachers are not really supporting this, but I’m going to try to get to Oxford,’ and they all sat there for a minute, shocked.
“Then when I finally got there, whenever I came back home, my friends were asking, ‘Do they eat lobster for breakfast? Is it like Harry Potter?’ And I thought, no, this is not right, because they really believed that these students were better than them. I’d say, ‘Guys, can you come up and visit me?’ They would make excuses all the time. I’d ask, what is going on? And they’d say, ‘I’m just scared. What if I have to have dinner and sit next to someone? What am I going to talk about? They’re too smart.’ And I felt, no, this is so wrong.
“That’s when I started thinking about doing the YouTube channel. ‘Why do you think just because they’ve gone to the university that they are better than you? In fact, you could have gone there too. We just didn’t have the right support, but you’re just as smart.’ ”
To her university friends, some of the more shocking aspects of her previous life took place in her early childhood. There are fragments of what happened in the book but she stops short of going into detail. The basic facts are these: Vee and her older sister were born into a stable family in Harare. Their father worked as a pharmacist, their mother at the passport office. This abruptly changed, however, when Vee was two years old and, in quick succession, her father died in hospital and her mother, forced to provide for her children on her own, made what must have been one of the most difficult choices in her life: travelling alone to Britain to seek her fortune, calculating it would take about a year for her to be able to afford the plane tickets to bring her girls over. She worked multiple jobs at a time, living in cramped conditions, often with others making the same sacrifice. It’s a story many of Kativhu’s online subscribers share. One year turned into two, and then into three. “When my mum moved to England… obviously, my sister and I, there were two of us and you can’t expect someone to look after both of us. So they just put us apart. And that was it.”
Vee and her sister were passed from family to family. There was abuse and great loneliness. “I hated it. It was the worst. And that was the hardest thing to write about in the book that took me a long time. These are real people who might read this. My sister said I shouldn’t be worried about writing about them. ‘You should be angry that they did whatever they did. They shouldn’t have done it.’ And there are a lot of questions. Why would you guys let this happen? But yeah,” she trails off, “it was… It was the worst.”
In the end she deleted the chapter. “I decided, ‘This is just not useful. This is not productive.’ ” What she will say is: “I remember when I got to the UK being like, ‘Mum, guess what happened?’ and I actually remember her sobbing because it felt like, ‘I left you. I left you there and if I’d been there, maybe some of these things wouldn’t have happened.’ But it’s such a common story. So many of my cousins were in the same situation – our parents migrate, then the grimness a few years later. In the book, I kind of said that but focused more on what should be done instead. Some of the things I had never said out loud before. So that was tough.”
She is a great admirer of her mother. “She was working many jobs at the same time. It’s crazy to me. Just the loneliness, I think, as well. I just can’t imagine it. She’d call us all the time and we talked to her and it was just… It was sad. Because I didn’t want to upset her but I had no idea who this woman was. But they always told me to tell her: ‘Yeah, I’m doing great, thanks. How are you? Yes, love you too.’ I had no idea.” One might imagine the reunification of a mother with her daughters after three years apart being a magical affair. In reality, she says, this is rarely the case.
“When we got to arrivals at the airport, my mother was there with her best friend, and my sister and I were thinking: ‘Which one is she?’ That’s how much I didn’t know her – at all. And it was, ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ and she would say, ‘I’m your mum.’ It was the worst. She hated it. And I would never say what was on my mind. It was just ‘yes’, ‘no’, because I was just used to that, right, moving around family to family. And you have to go in there not knowing how the person will be. They could be nice; they could not be nice. Just get on with it. So I assumed that was the same when I saw her… If they say, ‘Be quiet,’ you will stop talking because you don’t want to be kicked out. So that was it. And I was still young, but I still remember that. Going family to family just because you have to go to whoever can afford to have you that time.”
The word “influencer” has pejorative connotations that Kativhu would like to up-end. “I think that the word influencer, you already imagine, like, a girl who might have blonde hair who’s really into fashion and she only drinks Starbucks. And she’s like, ‘No, no, I can’t wear the same clothes twice.’ I love to redefine meanings – like, why do we have to put ourselves in boxes? I’m an influencer. And I’m very proud of that. But it just so happens that my lane of influencing is the mind; it’s discussing topics that really matter and making sure people are learning and investing their time and making the world a better place.”
I’m intrigued to know what happened to the teacher who told her, “Oxford isn’t for people like us.” “I think people often think that my teacher was black,” says Kativhu. “But, no, she was white. And that’s what made it stick in my mind even more because she said “people like us”, meaning the entire area. So this made the discussion so multidimensional; it’s no longer just about race. ‘People like us’ – it blew my mind.”
The school has since apologised, but not long ago, in a shopping centre, Kativhu ran into her former teacher. “I don’t even think she remembers it was her. Because it was such an offhand, regular comment for her. It was the same as saying, ‘I need a coffee.’ Afterwards she just walked away and went back about her business. But for me, that is something… It was the catalyst of so much that has happened now. I think that’s even more telling, like, wow, because when I saw her, she said, ‘I’m so proud of everything you’ve done! How was Oxford?’ And I was thinking, ‘Don’t you remember, you literally told me I shouldn’t go there and now you’re so proud of me. Which is quite interesting, that you could essentially crush someone’s hopes and dreams in one sentence. And it means so much to them, but it means nothing to you.’ ”
Kativhu is grateful for her own resilience. “It was due to my mum’s love and my family’s encouragement that I can push through. But not everybody has that.”
Again, she cites Michelle Obama. “She put it in such an amazing way: [people at the top universities], they’re not geniuses. They are smart people. But they’re not the smartest.” It’s odd, she finds, the persistent feeling among many young people of either intellectual inferiority or intellectual superiority, depending on their backgrounds: “Intelligence does not have a dress code, it doesn’t have an accent, and it doesn’t have a race. It is simply a question of, do you like studying? Are you passionate about what you’re doing? Are you willing to go the extra mile?”
Meet Vee Kativhu, the YouTuber who makes studying cool
When she came to Britain aged five, she couldn’t speak English. At school she was told ‘people like us’ don’t go to Oxford. She did. Now, Vee Kativhu is best friends with Malala and her videos are helping students to aim high
Like many of her wealthier peers at Oxford University, Vee Kativhu had spent time in her teens doing invaluable work experience at a sleek, internationally renowned blue-chip company. But while her fellow students were exploring executive suites and tracking share index prices in shiny HQs, for Kativhu it was exploring deep-fat fryers and touchscreen tills working behind a counter at McDonald’s in Birmingham. Her wages paid for the bus pass she needed to get to school.
It was at McDonald’s, she says, that she gained some of her most valuable life experience: how to problem-solve, how to read people, how to de-escalate situations and how to manage high stress, such as spending her evening selling Happy Meals and the entire night doing her homework. She was 17, academically driven, and it was while serving fries to some school friend or other who could afford not to work in their spare time that she experienced one of those realisations too uncomfortable to qualify as a lightbulb moment exactly: this juxtaposition between poor and rich, or certainly between poor and richer, felt uncannily like a glimpse into the future. There seemed to be a kind of illogical permanence to her situation.
And the same thing seemed to be playing out at school. Kativhu had arrived in Britain from Zimbabwe at the age of five, barely speaking English and, although she was by then outperforming other students, in the mind’s eyes of her teachers her background determined her future and she defaulted to the “unlikely to do well” category. Her mother had always encouraged her to aim high, so Kativhu was crushed when a teacher told her: “Oxford isn’t for people like us.”
Kativhu is now 23. She has recently moved into her first London apartment, as sleek as those executive suites. She pays for it herself, with money to spare. If you’re wondering how she achieved all this at such a young age yet your heart sinks at the thought of, say, watching a 13-minute video on the secret to exam revision, you’re unlikely ever to have spotted the niche that she did. When she put the revision video on YouTube – starring herself as its guinea pig – it became, at least among fellow bookworms, a sensation.
With Malala Yousafzai on her wedding day – the two became friends at Oxford University
VEEKATIVHU/INSTAGRAM
In her academic ambitions, Kativhu had always been an anomaly among her friends, but on the internet she found thousands of young people like her – girls, boys, young women and men who longed to go to the best universities but were surrounded by people who told them they couldn’t: teachers like hers, friends with different interests, parents who either couldn’t afford university fees or who wanted to see particularly their girls settle on a more culturally traditional path of marriage and children. “People typically get picked on for liking to study. It’s not so much about coolness, but more about, ‘There’s no one else here like me.’ ” Her life goal is making education available to all girls. Also: “I want to dismantle what intelligence looks like.”
Online, Kativhu is a rapturous and enthusiastic ball of energy. The word her followers most often use to describe her is “inspirational”. In real life, she is softer but still a warm and determined presence. She followed up the exams video with other hits: “How to write an amazing personal statement for any university application”, “How to stop being a lazy student”, “How to deal with self-doubt and imposter syndrome” and – after she went on to get a place at Harvard – “How I got into Oxford AND Harvard by the age of 21”. She keeps Nobel prize-winning company. When she started at Oxford, she discovered Malala Yousafzai living next door. “We both get it. She’d run off to do some amazing talk and then come back to a lecture. I’d catch a train to London to go do a YouTube talk. And then we just had breakfast every single day.”
She and Yousafzai are now close friends. Earlier this month she was one of a handful of guests at Yousafzai’s wedding, tweeting: “What a special day today was; witnessing Mal & my brand new brother-in-law become partners for life.” It was backstage at one of Yousafzai’s speaking engagements that Kativhu met Michelle Obama. “I just love her unapologetic nature. And I love how she is who she is – you would never, ever call her ‘Barack Obama’s wife’. In that moment, speaking to her, I felt like, ‘I can do anything.’ ” Vlogs Kativhu has shot since – “I read every book Michelle Obama recommended and now I’m becoming a new woman”, “Carving pumpkins with Malala and discussing global change” – have attracted thousands more viewers.
The suggested content that YouTube’s algorithm throws up once you’ve watched one of Kativhu’s videos gives the impression that the world she inhabits is still pretty grounded: another “study-tuber” confessing “My toxic relationship with productivity”, or videos showing “British high-schoolers taking Korea’s SAT English exam” and “Posh kids go to state school. School swap: the class divide”.
If she had a job title, it would be something like academic influencer and education activist. Kativhu’s is a unique proposition online: using her own experiences, she wants to challenge the correlation in many people’s minds between privilege and intelligence. Alongside the vlogs and the speaking engagements, she has this month given up her office job to publish a book, Empowered, an advice guide to all manner of young people but particularly those from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds such as her own.
With Michelle Obama, April 2019
VEEKATIVHU/INSTAGRAM
Her route to university was hard won, secured through her own research. “There was a course that was happening at Lady Margaret Hall, at Oxford University, called the Foundation Year. The programme was aimed at students who wanted to attend a place like Oxford but felt that, because of external barriers, they couldn’t.” Having completed the programme, she was the first black student to be accepted as an undergraduate from the course. Her chosen subject was classical archaeology and ancient history.
At Oxford she became more and more aware of a disconnect, in and outside the lecture hall: “My school friends thought that they weren’t an Oxford type of student because they thought they had to be superwealthy, go horse riding, wear clothes that cost thousands, be Prince Harry or something.” Meanwhile at college: “You’d have a tutor asking students things like, ‘What did you feel walking around the Temple of Athena?’ and I’d be thinking, ‘Wow, can we start at the fact that not everybody has been to Greece and visited a temple. Not all families go on cultural holidays every year.’ I’d be saying, ‘Guys, I haven’t been to Egypt yet. I haven’t been to Rome. Not everybody’s done this before.’ ”
She says that the friends she made at university with privileged backgrounds “were very aware of that privilege, but I think I was unaware of my lack of it because it’s all I ever knew. So meeting them and realising what they’d had, I was like, whoa, I couldn’t believe it… My university friends were shocked about the world I was coming from, because they just couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re telling me you’re in a class of 30 people – how does your teacher teach? It doesn’t make sense.’ ”
This sense of division came to the fore while writing her book, she says. “Yeah, that was a difficult moment. I cried. I stopped writing for the day because it was suddenly right there, so clear. I remembered talking to my school friends, saying, ‘Right, guys, the teachers are not really supporting this, but I’m going to try to get to Oxford,’ and they all sat there for a minute, shocked.
“Then when I finally got there, whenever I came back home, my friends were asking, ‘Do they eat lobster for breakfast? Is it like Harry Potter?’ And I thought, no, this is not right, because they really believed that these students were better than them. I’d say, ‘Guys, can you come up and visit me?’ They would make excuses all the time. I’d ask, what is going on? And they’d say, ‘I’m just scared. What if I have to have dinner and sit next to someone? What am I going to talk about? They’re too smart.’ And I felt, no, this is so wrong.
“That’s when I started thinking about doing the YouTube channel. ‘Why do you think just because they’ve gone to the university that they are better than you? In fact, you could have gone there too. We just didn’t have the right support, but you’re just as smart.’ ”
To her university friends, some of the more shocking aspects of her previous life took place in her early childhood. There are fragments of what happened in the book but she stops short of going into detail. The basic facts are these: Vee and her older sister were born into a stable family in Harare. Their father worked as a pharmacist, their mother at the passport office. This abruptly changed, however, when Vee was two years old and, in quick succession, her father died in hospital and her mother, forced to provide for her children on her own, made what must have been one of the most difficult choices in her life: travelling alone to Britain to seek her fortune, calculating it would take about a year for her to be able to afford the plane tickets to bring her girls over. She worked multiple jobs at a time, living in cramped conditions, often with others making the same sacrifice. It’s a story many of Kativhu’s online subscribers share. One year turned into two, and then into three. “When my mum moved to England… obviously, my sister and I, there were two of us and you can’t expect someone to look after both of us. So they just put us apart. And that was it.”
Vee and her sister were passed from family to family. There was abuse and great loneliness. “I hated it. It was the worst. And that was the hardest thing to write about in the book that took me a long time. These are real people who might read this. My sister said I shouldn’t be worried about writing about them. ‘You should be angry that they did whatever they did. They shouldn’t have done it.’ And there are a lot of questions. Why would you guys let this happen? But yeah,” she trails off, “it was… It was the worst.”
In the end she deleted the chapter. “I decided, ‘This is just not useful. This is not productive.’ ” What she will say is: “I remember when I got to the UK being like, ‘Mum, guess what happened?’ and I actually remember her sobbing because it felt like, ‘I left you. I left you there and if I’d been there, maybe some of these things wouldn’t have happened.’ But it’s such a common story. So many of my cousins were in the same situation – our parents migrate, then the grimness a few years later. In the book, I kind of said that but focused more on what should be done instead. Some of the things I had never said out loud before. So that was tough.”
She is a great admirer of her mother. “She was working many jobs at the same time. It’s crazy to me. Just the loneliness, I think, as well. I just can’t imagine it. She’d call us all the time and we talked to her and it was just… It was sad. Because I didn’t want to upset her but I had no idea who this woman was. But they always told me to tell her: ‘Yeah, I’m doing great, thanks. How are you? Yes, love you too.’ I had no idea.” One might imagine the reunification of a mother with her daughters after three years apart being a magical affair. In reality, she says, this is rarely the case.
“When we got to arrivals at the airport, my mother was there with her best friend, and my sister and I were thinking: ‘Which one is she?’ That’s how much I didn’t know her – at all. And it was, ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ and she would say, ‘I’m your mum.’ It was the worst. She hated it. And I would never say what was on my mind. It was just ‘yes’, ‘no’, because I was just used to that, right, moving around family to family. And you have to go in there not knowing how the person will be. They could be nice; they could not be nice. Just get on with it. So I assumed that was the same when I saw her… If they say, ‘Be quiet,’ you will stop talking because you don’t want to be kicked out. So that was it. And I was still young, but I still remember that. Going family to family just because you have to go to whoever can afford to have you that time.”
The word “influencer” has pejorative connotations that Kativhu would like to up-end. “I think that the word influencer, you already imagine, like, a girl who might have blonde hair who’s really into fashion and she only drinks Starbucks. And she’s like, ‘No, no, I can’t wear the same clothes twice.’ I love to redefine meanings – like, why do we have to put ourselves in boxes? I’m an influencer. And I’m very proud of that. But it just so happens that my lane of influencing is the mind; it’s discussing topics that really matter and making sure people are learning and investing their time and making the world a better place.”
I’m intrigued to know what happened to the teacher who told her, “Oxford isn’t for people like us.” “I think people often think that my teacher was black,” says Kativhu. “But, no, she was white. And that’s what made it stick in my mind even more because she said “people like us”, meaning the entire area. So this made the discussion so multidimensional; it’s no longer just about race. ‘People like us’ – it blew my mind.”
The school has since apologised, but not long ago, in a shopping centre, Kativhu ran into her former teacher. “I don’t even think she remembers it was her. Because it was such an offhand, regular comment for her. It was the same as saying, ‘I need a coffee.’ Afterwards she just walked away and went back about her business. But for me, that is something… It was the catalyst of so much that has happened now. I think that’s even more telling, like, wow, because when I saw her, she said, ‘I’m so proud of everything you’ve done! How was Oxford?’ And I was thinking, ‘Don’t you remember, you literally told me I shouldn’t go there and now you’re so proud of me. Which is quite interesting, that you could essentially crush someone’s hopes and dreams in one sentence. And it means so much to them, but it means nothing to you.’ ”
Kativhu is grateful for her own resilience. “It was due to my mum’s love and my family’s encouragement that I can push through. But not everybody has that.”
Again, she cites Michelle Obama. “She put it in such an amazing way: [people at the top universities], they’re not geniuses. They are smart people. But they’re not the smartest.” It’s odd, she finds, the persistent feeling among many young people of either intellectual inferiority or intellectual superiority, depending on their backgrounds: “Intelligence does not have a dress code, it doesn’t have an accent, and it doesn’t have a race. It is simply a question of, do you like studying? Are you passionate about what you’re doing? Are you willing to go the extra mile?”
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Did her management pay someone to write this? Or did they write it and asked them to publish it?
Also did she really compare her doing YouTube to Malala's talks? Her ego is bleeping ginormous
Also did she really compare her doing YouTube to Malala's talks? Her ego is bleeping ginormous
I am glad she has had some success but the expectations are getting out of proportion. Youtube fame will only last so long, and she has already proven she doesn't like working in a team office for more than a few weeks, so where will her drive and motivation come once fans start watching other studytubers? I fear she will have a slump of motivation once the money stops coming in. It's not sustainable long term.
It's really jumping all over the place, no structure at all.
I wonder - did she quit her job knowing the article was about to be published and under the assumption it would lead to ‘new opportunities’?
It was probably her management or publisher to promote the book.
Anyways I have some mutual friends with Vee and Malala and it's funny to hear her say that she 'just so happened' to find out that Malala lived next door when everyone who went to Oxford with them knows that she actively sought out Malala. It's also funny to hear her go on and on about how Malala is her bestest and closest friend when Vee definitely has other close friends. Malala has plenty of close friends who don't humble brag about being friends with her so I wonder why she keeps an obvious clout chaser like Vee around.
I enjoy the way she put 'Times Magazine' in her latest IG post, like anyone would get it confused for TIME magazine.
I do wonder how long Vee expects to hang onto Malala's coattails.