Marie went to a catholic convent girls school, and when she left school she initially did not know where her future lie. She looked into more studies and enrolled in text production course, and also continued to seek employment in order to gain experience and knowledge. Marie gained experience towards working as part of a team, working on using her own initiative, dealing all different types of customers. Marie gained an NEBS and NEBS Diploma in management and learned important skills around team building, conflict, budgets, processes, time management, benchmarking, planning, strategic processes, reviewing quality systems and controlling cost.
However, She still wanted to continue learning and decided she wanted to understand the concepts and theory of psychology. Marie studied for her psychology degree part time for four and half years whilst working full time in Tower Hamlets Family Intervention Services where she gained experience with hard-to-reach families with multi-complex needs. Whilst working and studying she also decided to work voluntarily in victim support. Her aim was to gain experience and knowledge in understanding the client problems whilst having the opportunity of helping people who had been a victim of crime.
From there Marie knew where she wanted to go. She trained in victim support for women, including for victims of rape and other traumatic experiences, and began offering one to one counselling. Her journey began to unfold once she knew specifically what she wanted to do, who she wanted to become and how she would progress. Marie continued to offer voluntary counselling sessions for the next three years.