Student's success helped by love of aerial dance

A woman who worked tirelessly to overcome her mental health challenges as a student, helped by her passion for aerial dance, is graduating from university with a first-class honours degree and starting a PhD.

Giselle Pearson, from Colwall, Herefordshire, has been named Student of the Year at Keele University in Staffordshire.

The 28-year-old said: "If I could have told myself when I was 16 and 17 that all is going to turn out well for you, and that you're going to be happy and succeed, I don't think younger me would have believed it."

She told the BBC how discovering aerial dance, a blend of dance and acrobatics, changed her life.

Ms Pearson had achieved four A*, three A and two B grades in her GCSEs, but in sixth form, her attendance declined and she sat one A-Level. But she went on to excel and graduate with a computer science and mathematics degree.

Describing how she had wanted to be a doctor when she was studying for her A-Levels and had her whole life planned out, she said: "I was very strict with the plans, and I knew what was going to happen, and in what order."

But she hated hospital work experience and when two GCSE grades were lower than expected, she started to ask "what if everything else in my plan isn't going to work".

She became depressed, developed an eating disorder and was later diagnosed as autistic.

Ms Pearson later completed a physics A-Level in her own time, but aerial dance changed everything.

She said: "It very much changed my mindset from this is how I want my body to look, I'm trying to restrict how much I eat and all of that, to fit this particular image I had.

"It changed it from that to being much more of a 'look at what my body can' do if I look after myself."

At Keele, she also set up an extra-curricular aerial dance society that now has more than 100 members.

She said after she won the Student of the Year award, she "cried a lot of happy tears".

She is now looking forward to starting her PhD on dyslexia in computer interaction design. Ms Pearson, who has dyslexia, wants to help others with the condition.

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