Shaal Karim, a former City Gateway Apprentice now working with Gateway Media, reflects on some of the ways his life has changed as the result of the training he has taken.

Hello I am Shaal Karim. Before I started City Gateway I went to college and done the best I could. I didn’t really enjoy going to college but the one subject that I did enjoy was Film and Media studies. Whilst at college I was also working in a Dead end Job working stupid hours and getting paid peanuts for the work I was doing. I worked for the whole summer of 2006 without a day off and that is when I knew that I had to do something to better my life and myself.

Then City Gateway came along, after I joined and was doing the courses I knew that I wanted to do something in Media and City Gateway gave me the opportunity. I had been working at my brother’s restaurant but had not got on well with the teachers and subjects at school.

I came through all the courses they run here, from a basic ‘Engagement’ programme right through to an NVQ Level 2 Apprenticeship where I was taken on by the social enterprise Gateway Media.

3 months into my apprenticeship my first ever short film that I was asked to make for Crossroads counselling was shown in Genesis Cinema. The film reviewed the charity’s work and asked more than a dozen young people for their opinions on mental health issues in the Borough. It was an unbelievable experience to sit in the back of that cinema and see my film on the big screen and I was almost in tears when they handed me a mini Oscar to thank me for my work.

Moments in life like these are the things you will never forget and I am thankful for that. I have now been asked by Crossroads counselling to make a short film on Child therapy. I am continuing to work for Gateway Media and loving every moment of it. As well as doing Media I am now a teaching assistant on the City Gateway Apprenticeship course which I recently completed and I am also doing youth work at Limehouse, things could not be better. In life if you don’t work hard you will never get anywhere and that is the motto that I live by.