Carla Cretan

Carla Mihaela Cretan (car'la mi'ha'ela cre'tzan) (Carla Mihaela CreÅ£an origin Romanian lang.) (born 1976 in Craiova, Romania) is a political researcher currently working on a research study on Eastern European migration and Eastern-Western European divide.
Biography
Cretan was born in Romania during the Cold War. At age 13 she witnessed the bloody Romanian Revolution and its live 24h broadcast on the Romanian Television that marked the Fall of the Iron Curtain and the ensuing dramatic transition years in the quest for democracy of the 1990s.
Her father was a reputable IT video and audio engineer who worked on international projects in East Germany and Iraq; her mother, a public administrator by profession.
Carla was educated in Romania, and was the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships to study abroad. She went to read English and Italian at the University of Craiova but always wanted to start a career in journalism and hoped to "escape" to Bucharest, neither of which was ever approved by parents. At the end of the first year at university, she managed to secure a scholarship to study Italian at Universita per Stranieri in Reggio Calabria in Italy which followed by a European funded-grant to do a professional degree in journalism and European studies „Europe in the World” at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, and the Danish National School of Journalism, Arhus, Denmark.
She was a foreign correspondent at the EU Parliament during the 1999 elections and worked on European assignments as a journalist, but it was difficult to sustain given the visa restrictions imposed, throughout Europe, on Romanian nationals since the 1990s. She started to write for the Dilema weekly, the most reputable cultural and independent quality publication with academic and elitist readership in Romania. She received good independent reviews in other parts of the media for the published articles [http://www.observatorcultural.ro/INTERNET.-Revista-presei.-Off-line*articleID_3162-articles_details.html].
She returned to the University of Craiova to finish her degree at parents’ insistence to obtain a „lifetime qualification to earn a decent living”. She was granted a special permission to complete two academic years in one, instead of repeating the gap years, and had to pass almost thirty exams and a dissertation chosen on sociolinguistics and communication before she finally graduated with an average grade just short of the maximum.
After the „most stoic exercise of rote linguistic memorisation to steer into the future”, she finally "escaped" to Bucharest where, she was offered a tax-free place at the , to embark on a nationally recognised Masters in Audio-Video Communication. She worked as an assistant producer and translator on a culture and entertainment show at the Romanian Television International Channel. During the national elections of 2000 in Romania, she worked on projects of political marketing, media and campaigning.
Driven by the international mirage, probably induced by the father’s reputation, she went to Berlin, Germany, where parents enjoyed „a second honeymoon” in the 1980s to read for a Masters in British Studies (Law, Politics and Economics), a unique programme in English, „as an excuse not to get a decent job as a TV Muppet”, and as an opportunity to look more closely at „the divide between East and West” by living in two capitals: Berlin and London.
She came to the UK in 2002 to work as Parliamentary Research Assistant for an MP, Jim Murphy, in the UK Parliament, and settled in London on a research grant. She returned to politics working at the Liberal Democrats London headquarters until the UK elections of 2005. Later she sought refuge under more „secure contracts” in academic research working as a Centre Manager for a research centre, accommodating a TV studio for educational purposes, at the Institute of Education, University of London, and other short stints in higher education, in management at University College London and St George’s , University of London, or on research projects.
Years of travels and attempts to find „the niche”, family grief, loss and bereavement and breakdowns, tight budgets and visa constraints, short contracts and work instability, took their toll while living in London: „Never loneliness felt so lonely in one loner’s loneliest life” was to add unprecedented stress, pressure and emotional vulnerability to the ambition to succeed.

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