When one sees the name Ain Husniza, they’ll likely think of the brave 17-year-old who launched the #MakeSchoolASaferPlace movement. It was a hashtag that stemmed from speaking up against sexual violence in schools, and it ended up reached 21 million people before even a single institution endorsed it.
Today, that once 17-year-old is now 22, and channelling that same instinct for change through the BA (Hons) in International Relations under the School of Politics, International Relations and Economics (SPIRE) at the University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM).
Why Ain Chose International Relations
For Ain, she sees choosing International Relations (IR) not as a departure from activism, but as an acceleration of it. “I came in thinking I wanted law, then I moved toward politics because I wanted to be the one drafting the policy," she explains. "But the more I sat with that, the more I realised even politics felt too contained. The issues I was working on—gender-based violence, school safety, youth rights—none of them live inside one country's borders."
Apart from helping her realise that change happens more easily within an international setting, the International Relations course has also given her the ability to understand why systems resist change in the first place.
“International Relations taught me that you cannot diagnose a system accurately without knowing its history, and you cannot change it strategically without understanding why it was built the way it was,” she elaborated. This shift has significantly informed her approach to her research initiative, Alt//orithm, which studies how algorithms amplify gendered violence online.
While she always had a strong intuition about what was happening on digital platforms, the resources that IR has given her, like methodology and the protocol for detecting uncoordinated inauthentic behaviour, have empowered her to build the exact evidence required to demand a response in high-stakes policy rooms. In Ain’s words, “it turned instinct into argument”.
Being at SPIRE has also trained Ain to engage with and understand people who hold a different perspective, as well as find the argument that holds up across the difference. The capacity to see the same situation through multiple lenses means she can sit in a parliamentary committee or stand in front of youth in a town hall, and engage with them equally.
When the Right Scholarship Meets the Right Candidate
Key to Ain’s new chapter is the UNM-YTAR scholarship. “YTAR (Yayasan Tunku Abdul Rahman) and UNM are not looking for students who kept their heads down and got straight As. They are looking for people who want to build this country and who need the intellectual environment to do it properly,” she said.
In other words, the scholarship is aimed towards high-potential undergraduate students who are driven and committed to making a positive impact in Malaysia. Apart from a full scholarship for tuition fees, recipients receive a monthly living allowance, a yearly allowance for stationery, books, and personal development, as well as a one-time allowance for a laptop, among others.
As a self-described “B40 kid from Cheras”, the scholarship represented not only financial support but validation of her activism and potential. It saw her not as a liability, but a student from a challenging background who had already demonstrated she can move people and shift systems.
Speaking to the next generation who want to follow in her footsteps, Ain emphasised the importance of getting the context. “The fire you have is real and it matters, but fire without framework burns the wrong things down sometimes.”
As such, she advises finding an educational environment that will take one’s lived experience seriously as a form of knowledge while also pushing one to understand the systems one is trying to change at their roots.
“Find your community of fellow nation-builders. Get the tools. Then go.”
At UNM, we offer not only BA International Relations, but also BA International Relations with French and BA International Relations with Spanish. To learn more about SPIRE as a whole and other foundation, undergraduate, or postgraduate programmes it offers, click here.
Posted on 21st July 2026