"I just fell in love with the country,” says a smiling Simon Parker when explaining why he moved to Romania from the UK back in 2003. Now, Parker says he enjoys a great lifestyle. He lives in the most exclusive part of Bucharest and runs a consultancy firm that helps some of Romania’s brightest students get into top UK universities.
Born in Chester, north-west England, in 1966, Parker studied economics, did a variety of jobs he never really enjoyed, before becoming a teacher. It was a job he took up with a passion. In the UK, he later led an adult education department of around 100 people at a sixth-form college. Then, in the middle of a rising career, he gave it all up in 2003 and left for Romania.
A country in transition
At the time, Romania was still emerging from five decades of communist rule. This included, since the mid-1960s, the disastrous rule by the country’s long-serving dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose version of communism was one of the most hard line in the communist bloc. Ceauşescu’s Romania was known for its terribly low standard of living, which included devastating shortages in everything from food to medicines.
In 1989, at the time of similar revolutions in most of the rest of the Eastern bloc, the Romanian people finally turned on Ceauşescu. Unlike the more peaceful revolutions elsewhere, however, it was accompanied by violence and death. Ceauşescu was captured, and a military tribunal quickly convicted him of crimes that included mass murder, after which he and his wife were both executed.
By the 1990s, the world had begun to learn of the terrible conditions in many of the country’s orphanages via distressing photographs and films. They showed maltreated and malnourished children, housed in decaying institutions. The country was struggling, even though aid eventually started to arrive.
In 2002, Simon Parker took his first trip to Romania, when he drove an aid lorry to the country. Although he is no longer religious, Parker was involved at the time with a church that organized aid trips to Romania to deliver supplies.
On that first trip, he was immediately smitten. The country fascinated him, and he couldn’t wait to return. He started to look for a job there, and in 2003, joined a state school in Bucharest, the highly regarded Colegiul Naţional Bilingv George Coşbuc. Parker packed his belongings into an ex-army Land Rover, and he drove from the UK across Europe to his new home.
Intercultural experiences
Reality soon hit, however. Though his determination to stay was not in doubt, there were plenty of challenges and culture shocks ahead. “I had no idea what a Romanian school was like. I was completely naive at the time,” Parker says. “In the staffroom, the television was on permanently.” And if it wasn’t on, the next person to enter the room would turn it on.
“I once visited a mayor in western Romania, and he had a TV on permanently,” Parker remembers, laughing. “And as for personal space — I remember having a chat with a colleague when we were in an empty classroom. She moved into my personal space, and I moved back. She felt uncomfortable because of the distance. And we went round the classroom like that.”
Parker was also sometimes confused by the way the school functioned. “In Britain, you have a class to teach. You go to that class, the kids turn up and you teach,” he says. “In Romania, you might spend an evening preparing a brilliant lesson, turn up the next day and be told that the classroom is needed by another teacher. Your lesson would get cancelled at the last minute.” At first, Parker was upset — even more so when the students sometimes simply wouldn’t turn up because one of their teachers had suggested they all go out somewhere. “They wouldn’t dream of telling me. At first, I was offended, of course. After a while, you realize it is absolutely nothing personal.”
It was a similar story in his private life, highlighted by an early attempt at organizing a dinner for two Romanian friends. The time for dinner was set at eight o’clock, and he spent hours preparing and cooking. At the agreed time, the meal was ready, but the guests didn’t arrive. He waited an hour, then two. After two and a half hours, they finally turned up, smiling. Parker was fuming at the perceived rudeness. The guests had met at a bar and decided they would go for the meal later. He came to understand that, “when a person says they are going to do something, it depends on what happens. It might or might not happen.”
Starting a new business
Nowadays, Parker is much more relaxed about such situations. He is, he says, “in their country and I don’t complain”. He does, however, insist on a high degree of punctuality when dealing with his own business. By the early 2010s, Parker had held various positions in Romanian educational establishments, both inside and outside Bucharest. He had managed a private school, done consultancy work and also worked on a big-budget teacher-training programme. He had also already started his own company, with a view to creating some kind of business in the education sector in the future.
A further central element in helping him to develop his business idea was his experience at a sixth-form college in the UK. It had given him a great deal of knowledge about university applications, including personal statements. Everything began to come together in the early 2010s in the form of an idea to create an education consultancy firm to help Romanian students to get into British universities. By 2013, his company, Albion International Study, had already helped its first seven students successfully apply for places at English universities, including the prestigious ones in Oxford and Cambridge.
After an initial online questionnaire and meeting, students are asked by Parker to write a draft application. This goes through several rounds of improvements, supported at every stage through detailed feedback from Albion International’s experts (a computer scientist for a computer science course, a mathematician for maths and so on). Parker stresses, however, that he and his team of experts never write the applications. “Even if the student is completely stuck, the specialist will not write it for them.” The application has to be in the student’s own words.
New challenges
The price for Albion International pre-university application coaching is €400, and it might start years before the actual application. At the end of a student’s penultimate year at school, the full consultancy package for the university application (including personal statement) costs €1,400. This includes analysing an applicant’s writing. “The Romanian style of writing is to use as many words as possible,” explains Parker. “You need a very succinct, British style, where you use as few words as possible.”
Brexit has created major challenges for Simon Parker, but he is optimistic about Albion International’s future. “Our business model will change a bit. We’re going to increase our prices a little. I’m not delighted to say it, but we are going for fewer clients and a higher value-added business model to maintain the margin.” Parker also wants to expand to other markets. “We are beginning to move into other countries, and that is something we want to grow. ”
After 18 years in the country, Parker is delighted he chose Romania. But it’s not just because he is the founder of a successful company and lives in an exclusive part of Bucharest. There has always been an element of romance to Parker’s story of leaving a secure, well-paid job to follow his heart. Almost two decades later, the reason he is still there is essentially the same.