A CHESTER student has picked up a scholarship award worth up to £20,000 designed to help women from low-income backgrounds studying in the UK.

Erinna Anthony, from Chester, is one of 15 recipients for the 2024 Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship, created in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering. 

Erinna is studying for a Computer Science degree at Durham University and was awarded a place on the scholarship programme because of her passion to use technology to work in cybersecurity, a career that has some similarities with the job she wanted to do when she was younger. 

“When I was really young, I wanted to be a lawyer,” she said.

“When I was in year eight at school, I took part in a cybersecurity competition, but I didn’t really know much about it.

“Over the next two years, I started to slowly become more interested in tech, but at that point I still wanted to go into law.

“Around that time, I wrote an essay for a piece of coursework on copyright laws for the online music space.

“That experience made me realise law involved a lot of reading, especially of texts that don’t change very much.

“That’s when I discovered I could still follow my dream of ethics and protecting people, but through a career in technology; specifically in cybersecurity.

“I found the online space interesting, and I started to enjoy reading and learning about cybersecurity.

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“I wanted to work in the field and studying computer science is one of the best ways to get into it.

“I learned about the Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship and applied for a place on the programme, and here I am.” 

Awardees like Erinna will each receive £5,000 annually for up to four years to support their university-related expenses, including tuition, accommodation, and living costs.

Alongside this financial support, awardees will also benefit from a comprehensive package that includes mentorship from Amazon employees to enhance their professional growth, provide networking opportunities, and the transition into employment.

She added: “Amazon obviously has lots of links with the cybersecurity world and the scholarship provides me with many networking opportunities with people who are doing the roles I hope to one day do myself.

“I think that being able to get to know these people is amazing, because they’re working on things that are genuinely shaping our world.”

She added: “We actually had a talk on this at university recently. There was a talk on imposter syndrome, which can be prevalent for women who work in tech.

“The general feeling is women are much less likely to apply for courses like mine because they feel like they don’t have the skills or qualifications for it. 

“I think you should take the chance, no matter how underqualified you think you are.”