From CSU to the UN: Andrej Verity's journey across the world

Working for the United Nations (UN) in The Hague, Netherlands, Mr Verity has been named the inaugural Alumnus of the Year for service to the community in the Charles Sturt University's Distinguished Alumni Awards.

This despite him never having actually been to a campus of CSU and having only ever spent two days in Australia. Although the Canadian-born Mr Verity said, it is certainly still somewhere he would like to explore.

"The problem with the world is it has just too many interesting places to go and as you visit more you just find more so the list keeps growing," he said.

Mr Verity completed his masters of information technology in 2010, after studying entirely remotely.

At the time, he had just begun working for the UN and decided to commit to the regionally-based CSU because of the flexibility it afforded in studying online.

"There were times I'd be deployed for a month or even up to three months, and it would be sort of within six hours notice," Mr Verity said.

"At that time in my job, I had a bag pack and I was on standby.

"Even during my masters, I was moved from New York to Geneva, Switzerland. So at the time when I was looking around universities, there were not too many that would let you do it online exclusively."

Mr Verity's pathway to the UN was not an obvious one. He admits he "sort of stumbled into that world".

When his wife's work took him over the Philippines, Mr Verity was approached by the UN to help build computer systems for their development program.

Upon the conclusion of that contract in a year, he and his wife moved to New Zealand where Mr Verity was once again approached to continue working with the UN.

This time, they asked if he would move to North Korea.

"The email said, 'we can't really find anyone. Are you interested', and I was like, 'oh absolutely'," he recalls.

When describing his life in North Korea to people now, Mr Verity said, he is often met with the same wide-eyed fascination. So few westerners ever get to see North Korea, let alone call it home for 18 months.

"People have sort of a scary feeling when they think of the country and what they know about it from the news," he said.

"We actually had quite a pleasant experience there. I mean definitely challenging [...] Pleasant in the sense that [we lived in a ] very small international community of people who were working in the sort of western embassies," he said.

Weekends and evenings were filled with dinner parties and social cricket games. But an ever-present awareness of danger still permeated Mr Verity's time in the closed country.

"You had to make the assumption that you were either being monitored or listened to or followed," he said.

"We only had one instance that we can remember where we were just we went out for a walk [on one of] my first days and we didn't read Korean. So we just took a picture down a street and someone very quickly came up to us and said 'no we need to take your camera'.

"Down that road on one side, there was sort of like a military facility, some kind of police [or] military-type office building and we were like, 'oh, well, we didn't mean to we were just taking a picture of the street for our own interest."

At the beginning of this year, Mr Verity and his family were living in New York. But in July, he took his wife and two teenage children to the Netherlands, where he now works in the UN headquarters.

"My wife and my kids were quite keen to sort of be able to explore the world and everyone was really excited about the opportunity to move from New York to the Netherlands and you give European living a try again," he said.

Selling their New York home proved a challenge as the city continued to struggle under the weight of the rising virus. Then arranging to have their family cat sent over to their new home in the Netherlands, Mr Verity describes as "a lot of fun, certainly very interesting".

Adjusting to their new lives, learning a new language and beginning afresh in a new country is never easy. But particularly so in a pandemic. Thankfully, Mr Verity said, the family are so far enjoying the challenge.