“Chess was a safe world for me to escape into growing up in Iraq”: Chemical Engineering alumna competes in BBC Two’s Chess Masters

Chess Masters: The Endgame, hosted by Sue Perkins, follows twelve rising stars of the UK’s booming chess community as they battle it out to be crowned Chess Champion.

Hi Deema! Can you tell us how you first came to Newcastle University and what made you want to study Chemical Engineering?

Newcastle was my very first experience of living in the UK, as I moved there at 17 from my homeland of Iraq to study. I fell in love with it instantly. It’s a well-known stereotype that the people of the North East are welcoming and warm, but to feel it and live it as an international student when you don’t know anyone made me feel very lucky that I had chosen this university.

When I was researching universities in the UK, Newcastle consistently came up as one of the safest cities for students and that was important to me as a young woman moving countries on my own. I was also fortunate to receive a scholarship from INTO to cover my first year of tuition fees - which as an international student are expensive!

Growing up, I loved chemistry and physics and wasn’t really willing to give either up – so Chemical Engineering was a great fit. I wanted to have the theoretical background in both subjects as well as the practical training to help me apply this to build machinery in real life. The North East has such a rich heritage of Chemical Engineering with the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of the North and all the refineries that absorb graduates. I wanted to join them!

Looking back, what were your favourite things about studying here?

You have everything on your doorstep at Newcastle. There were so many international restaurants and cuisines, all the social spaces on campus and societies to delve into, and the opportunity to form friendships with students from all over the world. I had friends from India, Qatar, Britain, from the North East, from America!

The course itself was difficult and I spent many nights in the library! But then we could just cross the road and go to Quilliam Brother’s for a late night cup of tea and play some boardgames to unwind. I was never a party girl, so spending my first year in Ricky Road was a shock to the system! But evenings in the teahouse were an escape from how difficult the course was.

Were you part of any societies or sports club while at university?

The main two societies I had an active role in were Engineers Without Borders and the Chemical Engineering Society. I was President of Engineers Without Borders for a year and as part of that I would organise STEM activities in local schools to inspire the next generation of engineers, as well as connecting our members with recruiters to help them take their next steps after graduating. The highlight of my presidency was holding a debate on nuclear power in the Students’ Union – I think the event is still available to watch on YouTube somewhere!

I also attended a few events with the Chess Society (of course!) but because my course was so challenging, and chess is a mentally challenging game, I didn’t take any organisational role in that group.

Speaking of chess, let’s move on now to your journey with the game. You first learnt as a child in Baghdad – what interested you about chess?

The reason I picked up chess was because I felt the outside world in the Iraq I grew up in was so unfair and chaotic and unpredictable. Iraq was going through a war at the time, and a chess board, with its 64 squares, is so predictable: everything goes by the rules.  So it felt like a safe world to escape into as a child. I’ve been playing ever since, but never played competitively until after the pandemic.

When the pandemic hit, I was in my first year of my PhD at Warwick University. Suddenly the university and all the labs were shut down, so I couldn’t do any of my experiments. I had to put my brain power to something, and I thought, let's pick up chess again. I properly trained for it and studied it, building up my rating and became a fide-rated player, eventually getting to the point where I now play under England’s flag! But I’d love to one day compete under the Iraqi flag in the Olympiad.

What would you say to any women reading this who are a bit daunted by the chess world but want to get involved?

I remember feeling this way. You are a little timid. You're a little shy. You don't have a great deal of confidence. Perhaps you haven't seen the proof of concept that I can succeed in X or Y or Z, whether that's engineering or chess.

But I encourage you to jump on that train and just see where the journey takes you. I had no idea when I picked up chess again that I would end up on the BBC four years later!  It’s never too late to pick up chess or any other sport that you have on your mind. It will take you places. It's certainly worth the ride.

In what other ways did your Chemical Engineering studies prepare you for competitive chess, do you think?

I think they’re both very similar skills. Both rely on you using both the detail and the global view to be successful. So, for example in engineering, you sometimes have to zoom in on the detail of designing a safety function to control fluid flow and the gas properties going through the pipe. But that’s not the only piece of the puzzle. If you want to have a safe system, you have to zoom out and see your whole plant. Is that safety function contributing to the elimination of a hazard?

In chess, you do the exact same thing. If you’re trying to calculate a move – say a knight taking over this bishop – is this a good move? Am I losing material? And before you make the move, you have to zoom out at the whole board and see if there are any other pieces at threat. Is my king potentially getting mated on the back rank?

How did you get involved in the TV show and what was it like filming the competition in Cardiff? 

It was a very happy coincidence, me initially hearing about Chess Masters! I was in a tournament in Leicester and was in the break area when I bumped into a woman. She said that she was looking for female chess players for a show and I just thought, is this real? It turns out it was – she showed me her BBC lanyard and email as evidence! – and we had a little pre-interview. I think she thought the back story of how I picked up chess was important to be reflected on television.

The actual filming of the show took place a few months ago in Cardiff. It was incredible to get to know all the players, because they're all such big characters in their own right, and we now occasionally bump into each other at tournaments.

I was fairly confident in chess competitions by this point, but it’s a bit different when you have 16 cameras filming your every move! It’s nerve-wracking, and you’re probably not playing your best because of the nerves. There were times when a lot of us couldn’t complete simple puzzles, despite being strong players. What added to the intensity was all the filming was jam-packed into just one week, so I was literally eating, breathing, sleeping chess!