My name is Eliyar Johnson Parsadoust and I am just about to turn 22 years old. I grew up in London, and moved to Bristol to study at the University of Bristol in 2022.  

I am interested in volunteering as I experienced a head injury in September 2023 which has lasted over a year. This really opened my eyes to the fact there's more to life than just bettering yourself and your own life, and has made me really want to make a difference in other people's lives no matter how small, because of what I went through with the head injury.

For me, I really struggled in moments during my head injury so to be able to potentially help others or have an overall positive impact on people or a community is something I am really passionate about now.

I am a very social person, finding it easy to get along with people of all ages and backgrounds. I think playing football 5-6 times a week growing up was majorly helpful in developing these skills as you join different teams with different people from all walks of life, and you must socialise and work together to be a successful team which really helped develop these skills mentioned above but also it helped in my ability to work in a team environment and to develop leadership skills.

To further my leadership skills, as well as my skills of working with children, when I was 16 I was nominated by my school for a sports leadership program. The programme specialised in teaching us how to run sports sessions for kids, teaching us how to lead a session, safety concerns during the sessions, strategic planning of the sessions and also how to work well with kids to create a fun but also educational sports session for them. At the end of the programme we got to run a session for young children from the local school.

In my GCSE's I achieved 6 A* and 4 A's, and at A level I achieved A*AA in Politics, History and Geography. 

In terms of my family life, I was born and grew up in London but my father is Iranian and left to come to the UK at 16 as a refugee at the time of the Iranian revolution. When he came to the UK, he did not speak any English, but he has gone on to create 2 impactful Businesses in the healthcare industry, which is a source of major inspiration for me. My mother was raised in Victoria, Canada, to which she also moved across the world to London at 23, which again is something I can't comprehend at such a young age but take major inspiration from. The balance from both my parents' upbringings, on opposite sides of the world, make me the person I am today.