Alumni – Where are they now?

Arran Kearny, past pupil, St Anselm’s College

 I would still probably be considered a ‘recent graduate’ of St Anselm’s College, having left the Sixth Form in 2019. A great deal has happened in the five years since, though it all seems to have occurred along the same trajectory – one that in hindsight I can see was first set during my years at school.

When it came to Universities, I couldn’t really summon up any great enthusiasm for one institution or another. I took a gap year, prompted on health grounds and also because I wasn’t yet willing to commit to anything. Most of that year was spent in lockdown, but I was still able to improve on my talents in running which I had honed through seven years of cross-country at St Anselm’s. Through this came an answer to my uncertainty: a sports scholarship offer to study abroad in the United States.

Four years of university later, two spent in Kansas and then two in Tennessee, and I have returned home. I do not regard myself as being a profoundly changed man; I think that the academic and religious qualities I first developed at school have been honed and sharpened by the time I have spent amongst a people and culture vastly different to our own. The make-up of a Liberal Arts education in America enabled me to do something that I don’t believe would have been possible in England: to pursue an education in the broader Humanities very similar in style to what I had experienced in my study of History, Literature and Theology in Sixth Form.

These pursuits, helped by excellent professors, grounded in a Christian University and surrounded by young people of faith, have served, I believe, to develop and grow the seed of faith that was first planted by my parents and parish, and by my time at school. I returned home with a sense of mission and purpose as yet unknown in my life: I wanted to work in the Church in some regard and help her cause in this country. This is what has led me, with some pleasing circularity, into the Chaplaincy position at my old school, where I intend to give students the same opportunities for growth-in-faith that I had myself.