2010 Student Profile

A hunger to travel the continents has been satisfied and now Daniel Brandl-Beck is quite happy to stay put, sit back and think about the world through his studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Daniel grew up in German-speaking Switzerland where an innate love of people, travel and culture developed.  While working as a travel agent, he and his partner embarked on a world-tour and found themselves in New Zealand.  He immediately fell in love with the country, so they moved to Auckland in 1995 where he worked for several years in the New Zealand travel industry and ran his own travel business.

After a while he became 'intellectually bored' and was inspired to enrol for part-time studies at Waikato University.

“After many years of mental to-ing and fro-ing, I finally decided to change my career path, sold my business, took some time out and, at the age of forty became a full-time student at Waikato University for the final year of my Bachelor of Arts degree in 2008”, he says.

One of the biggest barriers to overcome was the cost of full-time study, especially since his partner had also enrolled in full-time tertiary study. 

“We did out maths, budgeted our assets, potential income and expenditure and decided that we could financially just keep our heads above water, with the help of student allowances and some part-time work. Neither of us has ever regretted taking the plunge into our exciting new student life; not even for a moment!”

Daniel graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 2009 before flying through honours in History and English in 2010 with straight A+ grades.  His exceptional performance allowed him to bypass masters and enrol directly into a PhD in History. 

His PhD thesis A Tale of Three Cities interrogates how queer men’s travels to Berlin in the 1930s, to Paris in the 1940s, and to London in the 1950s have contributed to the formation of queer identities. This study will form part of a larger future project towards the history of gay travel.