“As optimistic as I am, there’s just no way I could have thought that would have happened. If I was a betting person, the odds on it were so long. It’s just mad,” Arday told The Times of UK, admitting he had “no idea” what he was doing when he first began writing academic papers.

He told the BBC that watching Nelson Mandela’s prison release in 1990 and witnessing South Africa’s 1995 Rugby World Cup win were among the most formative moments in his young life, vowing that if he didn’t “make it as a football player or a professional snooker player,” then he would “save the world.”

He said he never had a mentor teach him to write for academia, leading to a number of rejections — that is, until he finally reached his goal of teaching at the University of Cambridge. March 6 will mark his first day.
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