Alumni profile - Mark Agrasut

Not many prospective lawyers have first discarded the idea of becoming a fashion designer but Mark Agrasut's has been a more colourful life than many. After a "pretty regular" adolescence growing up in London and schooling at a venerable and rather traditional boy's school in Kent, Mark had signed up to study fashion design and photography rather than Classics, as was the general expectation. "When I left school, I did a gap year in Hong Kong to clear the cobwebs then threw myself into what I thought would be a completely different world at art school. However, I soon realised that much of what made up the buzz and mystique of the fashion world was actually quite annoying to me, and that I was built more for logic than for emotion," Mark explains. "I also decided that I didn't want my career to be ruled by the subjective opinions and whims of others, realised that I was probably a bit too risk-averse after all to make it as a fashion designer, and went to SOAS to study law and Chinese.