How would I talk to them about my research in a way that was accessible to them? I didn’t put them off using statistics for life?!
Needless to say, I spent quite a bit of time preparing and I decided that I wanted to tell them about my personal background and my journey into academia as well as presenting research findings to them.
I thought this was particularly important as an ethnic minority europe rcs data junior female academic; there’s not that many of us around. I also wanted to show pupils that attended on the day that there are an array of ways of forging an academic career.
I bit the bullet and admitted to them that I quit both my first and second degrees before finally gaining a degree by studying part time with The Open University whilst working at The University of Manchester. These kind of ‘failures’ are not usually what you expect of university academics nor are they the types of admissions that academics are generally willing to make. But it is important for pupils to hear about how things go wrong sometimes, especially in the current climate where there is an enormous amount of pressure on the young people of today to ‘succeed’.
The talk ended up going very well. The pupils were interested in the two examples of research using quantitative data that I presented to them.