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The Mentoring Pathways programme, which offers final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students the opportunity to be matched with a mentor, has been running for close to ten years. In this time, mentors have supported over 1000 students with their career aspirations as they look to graduate from the College.

Mentors are drawn from Birkbeck graduates and corporate partners working in a diverse range of professions and industries. But why do former Birkbeck students decide to mentor current students every year? We hear from two alumni who currently participate on the programme.

Kristin Dockar (Graduate Certificate in Systemic Practice (Child Focused) 2011)

I enjoy mentoring Birkbeck students as I believe I am making a difference to somebody. I am enabling and supporting to achieve end goals, remaining impartial, empowering, being a ‘sounding board’, sometimes being a ‘reality check’, and most importantly, developing a relationship of trust.

My motivation to become a mentor increased as I realised I could use the experiences I had gained over a long period of time in my career.

On joining the Birkbeck Mentoring Pathways programme, I received initial training which taught me to be mindful of the rules of engagement. Practical aspects such as where meetings would take place and how often, and discussions on exchanging email addresses and telephone numbers set the tone of the relationship. Discussions also took place around the purpose of being mentored and what outcomes could be aimed for. An important question to ask a prospective mentee is: “What do you want from a mentor?”

As a mentor I have always kept notes on meetings with dates and timelines included. I have also kept notes on what has been achieved and what ‘next steps’ are. This helps the mentee to set targets and achieve and finish tasks.

There are many do’s and don’ts to becoming a mentor, not least trying to tell someone ‘how I’ve done it’, The most necessary skill is the ability to listen actively and hear the stories behind the reason why this individual has decided to take on the daunting task of studying.

Last year I mentored a student taking a Masters’ degree in Policy Making. This student was interested in investigating the ‘hostile environment’ and the effect it can have on migrants to this country.

Because I have an extensive network of different professionals, I was able to link this student with a person working in Border Control in the Civil Service. He was able to provide advice on career opportunities shown on the Civil Service jobs website and give advice on writing a CV and Personal Statement, as well as advice on interview techniques linked to this career path.

I have also just finished mentoring another Birkbeck student studying for his Masters’ degree in Policy Making. Normally the programme would take place from November until June, but due to current circumstances, it has continued until the end of September this year which has worked well.

I have now signed up to the 2020/21 Mentoring Pathways programme and I can’t wait to get started.

Ken Gardiner (MSc Stratigraphy, 1989)

I studied at Birkbeck because I wished to further my education in geology beyond the initial BSc degree which I had obtained from the University of Southampton. So I decided to undertake a MSc Stratigraphy degree at Birkbeck. I could continue working in my job full-time living in the suburbs whilst undertaking the Stratigraphy course. Studying at Birkbeck allowed me to progress in my career as a geologist at Chevron to become a more senior member of a UK based independent oil and gas company.

I take part in the mentoring programme as I wish to contribute something back to Birkbeck as it helped me to build my full-time career in the oil and gas industry.  I also enjoy supporting young students who are looking to start or advance their careers.

What advice would I give to current Birkbeck students at this current time? Make sure you keep an open mind when looking at where you may wish to progress with your career and always have a checklist of where you feel your expertise and main strengths lie. Build your CV taking into account your education and work experience background to date and do not over embellish it.  Tailor your CV for each job application based on company research, and once you have several templates you’ll find you have a work in progress for each job application you make.

Amanda Flanaghan (Qualifying Law Degree 2019)

I never felt I really fitted in my first time around as an undergraduate at university some years ago, and therefore did not have the best experience. At Birkbeck, it enabled me to study at the same time as working, at postgraduate level, and meet some really great people who, like myself, valued the opportunity of studying and still remain close to me over a year since completing my studies. I really enjoyed being a student at Birkbeck: the course content, lectures and teaching style and I am inspired to attempt to eventually hopefully study an MPhil/PhD at Birkbeck. 

I was able to experience and live in a brilliant city, hold down part time work alongside gaining the opportunity to study on the LLM Qualifying Law Degree. The evening lectures meant I could have a good balance to fit in time for work and study which I really valued. The many libraries around the city (especially the 24 hour ones!) were useful to study at with people who I met on the course. For me it was a second chance at engaging fully in academic university life.

I take part in the Mentoring Pathways programme as I know that when I was studying for the LLM QLD, I valued how approachable and friendly our part time group was, along with the really valuable help and guidance I was lucky enough to receive from some lecturers and seminar tutors. Everyone was very helpful, and the course was very interesting. It was brilliant to be surrounded by people who were as inspired to be at university. It can be difficult to balance life with working and also studying and/or volunteering. I wanted to be able to give something, some of the experience and advice I had received to someone else coming up.

If you would like to become a mentor on this year’s programme, please complete this application form by Sunday 25 October.

The following blog is a transcript of a Birkbeck Inspires: Conversations with Alumni Podcast. Listen to the full podcast here

Narrator:

Hello and welcome to the ‘Birkbeck Inspires: Conversations with Alumni’ series, where we hear from former students and find out more about their time at Birkbeck. Birkbeck Inspires is the college’s free online events, activities and resources program, which has been designed to inspire learning, provoke thought and entertain and excite curious minds.

Today we hear from Dr David Gamblin, Lecturer in Birkbeck’s Organizational Psychology department and alumnus, Rick Payne, who interview each other to find out more about their fields of expertise and what brought both of them to Birkbeck.

Rick works at the Chartered Institute of Accountants in England and Wales and is also a mentor on Birkbeck’s Mentoring Pathways program. If you are interested in mentoring a current student in the upcoming academic year (just like Rick), please visit www.bbk.ac.uk/alumni/mentoring

Dr David Gamblin (David):

Hello, I’m Dr David Gamblin, I’m a Lecturer in the department of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck and Program Director for the MSc Management Consultancy and Organisational Change. Today I’m really, really pleased to be joined by Rick Payne, Birkbeck Alumni from the MSc Organisational Behaviour and current Manager of Finance Direction, a thought-leadership program from the ICAEW.

Hello Rick.

Rick Payne (Rick):

Hi David.

David:

How are you doing today?

Rick:

Good, thank you. Glad it’s Friday but very well, thank you.

David:

Wonderful. So we’re going to do things slightly differently today in terms of some of the other alumni interviews. We’re going to start with me interviewing you and then flip it on its head and get into a bit of a discussion about decision making and uncertainty, which I’m very much looking forward to.

Rick:

Same.

David:

Wonderful. So to kick things off, Rick would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your current role.

Rick:

I got my first degree in Economics from Manchester, trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG, then spent 17 years in wholesale banking. Towards the end of that I got involved in organizational development and that’s what took me into Birkbeck and studying the degree we’ll talk about a bit later.

Currently I work at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). I do practical applied Management Research, which involves talking to a lot of members and finding insights from them and putting it together in reports and presentations and getting those learnings out to other members. Hopefully through that we help people with their careers and we also help their businesses to be more successful.

David:

Super. Sounds like a really varied role with a good balance of research and practice. It sounds a lot like the Birkbeck model in the department of Organisational Psychology, that science-practitioner role. I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about what you did at Birkbeck and when that was?

Rick:

I did an MSc Organisational Behaviour, which is occupational psychology without the chartership at the end of it. And I studied at Birkbeck from 2004-2007. Organisation Behaviour covers topics like organizational change, training and development, selection and assessment, work and wellbeing – quite a broad range of anything to do with people and organisation.

David:

A lot of people who will have been studying at Birkbeck, the people listening will be able to empathize with this, will be working, studying at the same time, come from busy backgrounds, busy lives – I’m just wondering, how did you find it?

Rick:

It was quite strange for me as I was going through two changes at the same time so when I started studying I’d just left banking to start up as a coach and trainer. But I wanted a more rigorous training through the MSc. Trying to set up a business and do the readings and work with everything we had to through the course. They were complementary, they helped with both sides but it is quite a juggling act. I got really into the research side of the MSc and probably paid too much attention to that and too little attention to setting up as an independent consultant.

One of the things that is worth mentioning is at the time, there wasn’t a mentoring scheme at Birkbeck. I’m now involved with the Birkbeck Mentoring scheme and working with the people in the final years of their degrees. Some people really have to work hard to balance the two and set priorities and I think the mentoring program can help with that to make sure people stay focused on doing what they need to do and what’s most important for them. I’d highly recommend people make the most of the mentoring scheme. I’ve had a year off from doing it as I’ve already done four. I’ve applied again so hopefully I get accepted to take on another mentee.

David:

That would be great. I really do recommend people get involved with that and I’m sure a lot of alumni and people listening definitely relate to that difficulty in balancing the workload. It’s really nice to hear the synergy you found between studying, research and what you were putting into practice as well.

Rick:

It reminds me of a Professor at the time who was very interested in the word ‘stress’ and students would always say ‘it’s quite stressful juggling work and studying’ and he would say ‘what is stress? We need to be more precise with what it means’. He wanted students to be more specific about what it means. This was one of the good things about Birkbeck – having your ideas challenged.

David:

We talk about an induction in our department, about the Birkbeck approach, critical thinking, viewing a lot of the theory through a critical eye. I think now more than ever that has really come into play with a lot of the theories and frameworks being challenged as we go through lockdown and the pandemic. How well do the theories stand up? Are they predicting how people are feeling? Are there gaps in the literature that we need filling at some point? So really good to hear that critical perspective was taken when you were studying at Birkbeck.

How did you find it? Did you really enjoy it? Was it something that was difficult, getting into that frame of mind? Sometimes it’s a mix – some people find it very challenging and some people take to it very quickly.

Rick:

I think I did, it took a while. I remember being very disappointing with the mark I got for my first essay which I thought was fantastic. It got critique, constructive critique. It clicked in – I now sort of get it, what are the practical implications, what’s the rigor and the underlying thinking you need to put in, what is the academic side to this. I think that was quite difficult to get to grips with the importance of theory. Then you start to progress and realise you are using all sort of theories; we generalize about how the world works so it was difficult to start with but with the help of tutors you work through it and it becomes more natural. It’s certainly been helpful in my job. And I think it’s interesting just having this conversation, one of the things I really enjoyed studying is the different perspectives on organisations and ‘images of organisations’ which is a really good book. It looks at different metaphors and lenses we use.  Do we view organisations as machines or cultures or political arenas? It’s just occurred to me that maybe I should use those metaphors again and go through the implications of the pandemic and take on those lenses and see what conclusions it leads to.

David:

That’s a great point. My research background is around decision making so the number of metaphors that get used for the brain changes throughout time from the humors to more mechanical models and then famously the computer metaphor for the brain and now people are starting to challenge whether that is a particularly good metaphor or not. Is the brain really like a computer or is that leading us to make misconceptions about what the brain does and its purpose. So looking at metaphors is a really interesting one and trying not to get stuck in the same lens for a prolonged period of time without challenging it.

So that brings me on to the next question – what about studying organizational behavior has really helped you in your career, life, research and any of the roles you have taken since Birkbeck? Multiple-perspective and critical angle may be one – has it translated into what you do currently?

Rick:

Very much so. I don’t think I would have gotten the job I currently have, which I really enjoy, without having that Master’s degree in Organisational Behaviour. I think it gave me a uniqueness – it’s unusual to be qualified accountant with a degree in Organisational Behaviour. I was able to bring together both my business knowledge with that people side of things. As our members go through their careers, the technical side becomes, for many of them, less and less important, it’s more about leadership, building teams, building systems, developing strategies and so on.

Being able to bring all of that knowledge from the MSc and the ability to research things – so how do you take a question, pull it apart and start to come up with something that is maybe a bit more interesting than the standard approaches to that can be reached by the general consulting approaches. By having the knowledge that there are many ways of looking at questions, certainly has helped me in my role and hopefully produced some outputs which are a bit different to the normal stuff that comes out of organisations on business. Definitely has been fundamental to me being able to do my role at the ICAEW.

David:

Totally agree with the importance of conducting research properly – such an important skills and transferable skills to pick up on. It’s the reason our Research Methods module is one of the first one people do. It’s an important one to get into that frame of mind early on – how to conduct research and critique what other people have done to make sure it stands up to scrutiny, I think it is really important.

Really good and interesting to hear you are carrying on with the research in your current role. Are there any research projects you are working on at the moment or research findings you’d like to mention?

Rick:

I’m looking at the CFO strategy – it’s been quite a long-term project for various reasons. It involved interviewing a number of CFOs from different backgrounds. What was interesting was the difference between emergent strategy and planned strategy. The idea that strategies emerge from patterns and post-rationalisations vs the traditional view that you sit down and discuss what your strategy is going to be, map it out and plan it. It’s clear to everyone now that strategies can go out the window very quickly.

It’s also been about exploring the different roles the CFO plays in strategy so anything from orchestrating the process, adjudicating and allocating resources and how they can be quite creative and come up with new ideas and strategies.

David:

That’s really interesting. Where can we read any of this? Is it in-house to the ICAEW? Do you publish anywhere?

Rick:

This is all published and freely available to everyone – google “ICAEW CFO Strategy’ and you should get to the report. We tend to keep our thought-leadership work open to everybody so it should be findable. Previous work on finance business partnering, which has some interesting parallels with human resource partnering, where the concept came from – that’s been one of our most successful pieces.

David:

I’ll check this out after we wrap up today. It sounds really interesting; you hear about research done on people in leadership positions and about them acquiring new skills. From what you’re talking about in that people maybe shift onto soft skills; leadership, resource-allocation away from technical skills is also an element of stop doing certain things or even unlearning certain behaviors. I think that’s really, really interesting.

Rick:

So I guess we’re going to turn the tables a little bit and ask you about your time at Birkbeck and what you’ve enjoyed most?

David:

I’ve been at Birkbeck for just over a year and a half. I think Kate Mackenzie-Davey who’s just retired after 26 years at Birkbeck, you would have probably studied under Kate.

Rick:

Yes, I did indeed. Politics and Change – I remember it well.

David:

Super. So as Kate’s retiring this year, she said it best, ‘it’s the students that make it special’ and I wholeheartedly agreed with that. We get such a nice mix of students from different backgrounds, different work experience – it means they can bring all kinds of things to the table when we’re having discussions. We had a nice example over the summer in the module I taught with my colleague and co-convener, Dr Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya on workplace health and safety. People from backgrounds such as the hospitality industry, greeting card companies, people in care homes, all of these different backgrounds bring different stories to the table, meant that we could have quite interesting discussions. Anything from an employee engagement program which can be a method of controlling your employees – is positivity part of professionalism? Should we have to force people to have to put on a happy face for example? Or where do discussions around diversity and equality fit into a subject like workplace health and safety?

I don’t think you get these kinds of discussions at other institutions whereas at Birkbeck it’s all of these backgrounds and experiences coming together which people can share with the group in a really critical and open-minded way. It’s the students that have made it such a special place to teach.

Rick:

I definitely echo that. As students, one of the great things is that we start of in class discussing an issue with each other in working groups with lecturers and then we would end up going down the pub continuing those discussions quite often. It was really quite fascinating, as you say, to discuss things with people from lots of different backgrounds and I’m sure some of my fellow students would say they have made some of their best friends through studying at Birkbeck, and I certainly keep in touch with a number of them to this day.

So in that spirit we thought we would try to re-create a discussion of an issue to give people a feel for what it’s like. At the ICAEW we are particularly interested in decision making under uncertainty, which is one of David’s areas of expertise.

David, maybe you could start off by exploring the main way in which people make decisions.

David:

In the 40s and 50s decision-making theory was in the hands of economists. They were responsible for a lot of normative decision-making models, which teach us how we should make decisions and optimum benchmarks. A lot of economists claimed that humans were rational beings, we evolved to be rational thinkers, the brain is essentially a machine for making rational judgements and that kind of thing.

One of the famous theories that stems from that is the expected value theory which tells us that to work out whether or not we go with an option we need to work out the expected value of that option; what it’s worth. To do that we would look at all of the different outcomes that could come about with a particular option, whether it’s investing in a new fund or it’s the decision to go for a picnic. You look at all the different outcomes that are possible and you take the probability of each one and multiple it by the value you’d get if that situation did occur and we sum all those products up and that gives us an expected value of each option. We then compare across each option to see which one will give us the highest value and in theory we go with that one. So it’s a very rational, very analytical process for decision making and it forms the basis for a lot of decisions made and trainings and workshops today to become a better decision maker, to become a better thinker. This is what you need to do, you need to structure your decision like this, generate a grid of possible decision outcomes.

Rick:

That certainly underlies a lot of accounting approaches to decision making and indeed some of the things I’ve been reading are still pushing that approach.

David:

Yeah, I think so. It’s a very popular and tempting one to use in a workshop or decision aid. I guess no surprises it’s still being taught. I suppose rightly or wrongly because stemming from that came Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky and they brought the heuristics and biases approach. And someone like Richard Taylor is seen as the father of behavioural economics, then Daniel Kahneman is probably seen as the Godfather of that movement. He really challenged that normative approach by economists such as expected value theory and said is that really how people make decisions? Are we really rational thinkers? Is the brain a rational machine? Their line of research exposed a number of systemic errors or predictably patterns in error that people make in decisions. From that Kahneman proposed two different types of decision making – type 1 is intuitive, quick, fast, low-cost kind of decision making and type 2 is the analytical, effortful, more rule-based, process-based decision making that is more similar to normative theories proposed by economists.

So he split it down the middle and said we’ve got a lot of these areas that people make when their decision-making and their line of research has identified a lot of heuristics and biases that people had and as well as dual process theory that might be two different systems Kahneman called it, the intuitive and analytical. There is some debate about whether there’s actually two systems or where it’s like a continuum with analytical and intuition at either end of the scale.

Probably a big thing coming from that line of work is this idea that intuition shouldn’t be trusted because it leads to a lot of errors in contrast to that Gary Klein came along with a naturalistic decision making program of research that said we’ve got a lot of experts out there, we’ve got a lot of people in the military, doctors, we got firefighters, people that work in incredibly challenging situations that have to make snap judgements under pressure and they are able to do a really good job of it actually. How do they do that if Kahneman said people make lots of intuitive errors. So Klein research challenged that notion but also the way Kahneman’s heuristics and biases approach was quite lab-based starting to look at people in the real world bringing in a bit more observational data and saying want are people actually? How come they’re so good at decision-making? So those would be the three or four big stereotypes of decision-making. You’ve got the very very rational economic model, you’ve got Kahneman’s type of biases that intuition that leads to a lot of errors, and you’ve got Klein’s version which lead to a very very accurate and amazing insights a lot of the time.

Rick:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting to reflect on the different ways and think about ourselves and how we how we make decisions. And given these different approaches maybe you could talk a bit about the pros and cons of the different approaches and what you do to make the most of things?

David:

Yeah so I’ll go through each one as they’ve each got lots of pros and cons, sometimes which can be the opposite of each other. Starting with the normative approach which is the economic model, the idea of expected value theory, this very very process driven, working with probabilities – the pros is it provides optimum benchmarks for outcomes. So if you can do it and you’ve got the data and you can get these probability judgements from, I guess, a lot of historical data that you can use, then it should be providing you the optimum outcome, that should be the correct solution as economists would say.

The con is people don’t really think like this, this is very difficult for people to do and as a result a lot of trainings around expected value theory and economic model end up failing in the long term. People walk away thinking that they’ve learnt this and they can do it but in the end it becomes very unnatural, very difficult for people to do and they end up falling back on things like intuition and sometimes they do that without even realizing they’re not doing the economic solution anymore.

Rick:

Does that relate to the idea of you know what decision you want to make based on your heuristic and then you back it up by some spurious numbers and rational expected value calculation.

David:

Yeah, definitely it’s absolutely true people will think they’re doing something like an expected value theory. They are plotting the grid, collecting the data but little biases sneak in there all the time, so things like confirmation bias and you see people find and tweak the probability and the values in this grid to make sure the solution churns out the thing they wanted it to in the first place. So it’s not a silver bullet getting people to make decisions in this way. There is still a lot of heuristics and biases, sort of ghosts in the machine that are very hard to get rid of.

Yeah and there’s a whole host of research that people really struggle with putting it into practice. People are not particularly good at following probability rules so you’ll find circumstances where people’s probability don’t sum up to one, when there can’t be more outcomes from there are in terms of probability – it should all add up to 100%.

We get things in the research like errors of transitivity and preference reversals. One of my favourites is the idea that a credit surcharge and a cash discount are essentially the same thing. There are different prices for using cash and/or your card but when you describe a transaction using these different frames, it can have different results. People find it more persuasive if you can say there’s a credit surcharge on this transaction. They then avoid it and pay cash. If you tell people there is a cash discount on this, they are not as convinced and might just be happy enough going along with the card. People are quite happy to forego a discount but they are not happy if they think they are going to be penalised for something.

It’s little things like that, which when you plot it out in a rational economic model like expected value theory it shouldn’t make a difference. They are basically saying the same thing. But when you find people doing it in the real world you get these little little reversals.  

Intuition in Kahneman’s mind is very fast, it’s very low cost. Some researchers say it has no cost whatsoever, it cost absolutely nothing in terms of cognitive resource. We should be able to do it no matter how busy we are. Others will say not nothing, but a low low cost.

A lot of the time it is good enough. It gets us from A to B. We’re using these intuitions, these heuristics to get by. And we make a lot of our decision based on it. Things like opting for the default a lot of the time would be a kind of low-cost intuitive rule which a lot of the time works. We take our default route home, we don’t sit there and analyse every single possible coffee and what the probability is that it give us a certain level of satisfaction. We go with that default, that gut feel.

The con is that it leads to a lot of biases which I guess we’ll talk about in a bit. Things like overconfidence in anchoring biases, framing effects. So although it’s low cost and a lot of the time it’s good enough, it is the one that leads biases and errors.

In terms of analytical thinking, it would just be the reverse of the type one really. Analytical thinking can be more accurate, it tends to give us a good benchmarks but the con is it slow, it’s effortful and it’s a very very costly in terms of cognitive resource. There is not a lot that you can do while doing a complex bit of analysis, it takes a lot of a lot of brain power.

And then the other side of that would be the Gary Klein approach talking about expertise and expert intuition. It’s like reversing again in that the pro is that it can result in incredibly accurate decisions in very very difficult situations like emergency room or under fire from an enemy in a military scenario. People can come up with amazing solutions to problems using their intuition.

The downside of it, the con, is that requires extensive experience in order to get to that point where you can rely on your expert intuition. And it’s not just experience in terms of time in the role but it needs to be a kind environment. So it can’t be too noisy, you can’t have too many confounding variables at play, you can’t have a lot of spurious correlation. You need to be quite kind and quite clean and you’re getting nice good timely feedback.

So those would be the pros and cons of the different ones. I suppose quite similar.

Rick:

Given those, what advice arises out of that to help people to make better decisions?

David:

Its’s the big question again. I’ve tried to stick to a few here but this is a huge field of work but it’s still ongoing to how do we conquer this because in some aspects the heuristics and biases are fairly new.

I’ve got a few points I will mention. The first would be awareness is really really important. Awareness of the different types of biases, the different types of heuristics we use, the different traps and pitfalls that we might fall into. So I suppose everyone listening, go and have a read of Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ would be a good start.

That’s a really good example of a lifetime’s amount of research that has gone into the pitfall and traps people fall into and what to be aware of. I think it’s a good starting point because it may not make you a perfect decision maker but what it’s going to do is highlight areas where you need to be extra careful, for you exercise a little bit of extra caution. So little things that you can do if you feel like you’re falling into an area where a bias could sneak in.

So you can do things like reframing the information. For example, the credit surcharge, if someone’s telling you that there’s a credit surcharge you can reframe that question and say would I reach the same decision if I thought of this as a cash discount? The same thing if you are in a supermarket and see sausages marked-up 80% meat, think in your head, ok what if that sticker said 20% non-meat? Would that change your mind about how delicious those sausages are going to be? If so you might be falling into a trap of a bias.

So try reframing information, trying to take the outside view. We’re very good at making decisions based on information is presented to us, so we can see right in front of us. We are very good at making decisions based on what’s right in front of our eyes but not so good at making decisions or drawing illusions from what’s missing. So trying to take a step back, trying to look at the outside view and finding useful reference classes so people who’ve been in similar situations – what did they do? Did they succeed? Did they fail? How similar are they to me? How similar is their situation to what I’m going through at the minute?

We should do this automatically in novel situations, for example things that are very very new to us. We can almost feel ourselves slipping back into that analytical mode of thinking. So imagine driving your car and you’re on a bit of unfamiliar road, an unfamiliar junction. You find yourself going into analytic mode and any conversation that you’re holding with a passenger sort of pauses and you draw that extra attention or resources into figuring out where you are. But what about routine ones, routes that you always take? You tend not to think too much, tend not to process too much about what’s going on and you can happily hold a conversation with other people in the car because you’re not using up too much energy and effort on the drive.

So it’s those kind of novel situations where people are reverting back to intuition whereby accidents can occur, just being extra careful that we’re not falling into a trap of one of these heuristics and biases. Ok – maybe I can analyse this a little bit more, reframe the question, take the outside view.

Rick:

That’s really helpful. I think we can take a lot about like the idea of the sausages in particular, and practicing one things like that.

Finally, people are currently making lots of decisions under uncertainty but also a lot of pressure. I know that’s another area you’ve looked at – taking decisions when you’re under a lot of pressure. Is there anything in particular you’d mentioned there just to wrap up with?

David:

I would say I’ll go back to your professor from earlier you were talking about who maybe didn’t like the word stress. I think we can be maybe specific and try and challenge what we’re thinking about stress because sometimes pressure is a good thing and sometimes adding pressure helps.

So adding pressure can increase the effort we put. For example, increasing accountability, transparency or incentives can add pressure and it can increase effort. There are certain scenarios where increased effort can result in better decision making and performance, but not always. Because when we talk about stress and anxiety, it’s a different matter. As I mentioned when driving the car, we’ve got this limited pool of potential resource we can either spend it analysing the route or we can hold a conversation. Trying to separate that attention on different tasks is quite an important thing because if we start drawing attention away from the tasks we’re trying to complete we end up making mistakes.

So there are a lot of downsides to this. We can fall into the trap of making lapses and slips, forgetting things, applying the wrong rule. A lot of the time this is unintentional, there can be times when it is intentional. These are known as violations in the taxonomy of human error. Increasing the pressure and making a very pressurised situation can increase a number of violations people make as well. Trying to do things sneakily, take shortcuts, flaunt the rules in order to maybe get home on time. If you’re an auditor, maybe we’re not going to check that final invoice back to the debtor’s ledger. So that’s the kind of violation people might be making on purpose.

What do we do about it?

There are two general approaches. One would be an individual approach and one would be a systems approach. I guess the ICAEW’s exams is a useful example. I didn’t do all of mine but I got through to the professional stage and I’ll tell you it’s a very difficult set of questions and it’s a very strict time limit under a fair bit of pressure. I suppose there’s a reason why the pass mark is 55% not 90% or 95% to pass. It’s a highly pressurised environment, you’ve got to expect errors with a lot of stress, difficult questions and a time limit. People are going to make errors.

So the systems approaches is all about that. We are human, we’ve got to expect error. So if there’s anything that we can do to focus on the system rather than the individual and say can we engineer things in the environment to make it a bit easier for people. An exam example would be reducing the difficulty of the question, removing the time limit, adding people that can help or adding resources and machines to help us.

The individual approach on the other hand would focus on the individual and would say what can we do with this person to reduce their stress. We can do things like mindfulness to reduce the impact of stress or we can reduce the demand tasks have through repetition and practice. The more and more you do something, the easier it becomes.

For a comprehensive answer, you have to do a bit of both. Focusing only on the individual is a little bit unfair as it puts the blame on them. There are skills we can equip them with to reduce the demand of what they are doing. Overall I think we need to look at the systems approach, which I think a lot of auditors would appreciate.

The final tip would be in terms of decision making and the systems approach would be not just focussing on outcomes when we’re looking at our decision making. We are living in a very uncertain world, a very noisy world, there are a lot of times when outcomes are positive but have resulted from chance and sometimes a very system and decision-making process went into it. And vice versa a lot of good decision-making might go on in the background which leads to a bad outcome, which could be chance. So I need to tell the auditors out there the importance of controls testing and focusing on assistant not just the outcome as there is a lot of chance and a lot of noise going on.

Rick:

Thank you, that’s really helpful and we do urge people to review their processes because we sometimes, we’re just on to the next problem, on to the next issue without reviewing how can we do things better, what have we learnt.

So David from my perspective and what we’re doing at ICAEW that’s been really helpful and I’m sure our members and audience will get some valuable tips and hopefully will follow up on some of those ideas.

Thank you very much.

David:

My pleasure. It’s been really enjoyable to have someone to talk to about that all of these different bits of theory and research.

Thank you very much.

Narrator:

That’s the end of today’s podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening. Make sure you check out what else Birkbeck Inspires has in store at the website www.bbk.ac.uk/birkbeck-inspires

Eva studied for her Graduate Certificate, MA and PhD in History of Art at Birkbeck, spanning a period of nearly 10 years. Her thesis is being submitted later this year and focuses on the significance and context of late medieval art and architecture in Swedish Parish Churches.

What encouraged you to attend Birkbeck?

Through a long and successful career in banking, I had always held an aspiration to study a subject in the humanities. An opportunity to explore this ambition further arose when my husband and I decided to start a consultancy business together.

My initial attempt at a few lifelong learning courses at other institutions did not provide the level of academic rigour that I was looking for.  On the recommendation of friends who had already studied at Birkbeck, I was attracted by the wide range of courses on offer at the College.  I came for an initial interview in the Department of History of Art and immediately felt that it could offer the level and flexibility of study that I wanted. Hence, following completion of the excellent Graduate Certificate programme in History of Art, I decided to continue with an MA. It was during the MA programme that the pursuit of late medieval art and architecture in Northern Europe and Sweden started in earnest. Those studies subsequently developed into my doctoral project and now my PhD marks the crowning achievement of my studies at Birkbeck.

How did it feel studying again?

Being a mature student free from outside pressure has been incredibly rewarding. Of course, my chosen academic path has not been without challenges, but the opportunity to study purely for the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking has been a privilege.

Tell us about your PhD and what inspired you to continue your studies.

The subject of my doctoral project is late medieval art and architecture manifested in parish churches around Lake Mälaren in central Sweden. As a Swedish national, Birkbeck offered me the opportunity to bring this unique material to a wider academic audience. A central strand of my research concerns the interrelationship between architecture and image and their function in contemporary liturgical and devotional contexts. In so doing, my thesis argues that the mode of viewing and the expectation of the audience become critical tools for their interpretation.

Congratulations on completing this year! What are your next steps? 

My plans are still work in progress. I have some small amendments to make before my final thesis hand-in, then, as a first step, I aim to investigate channels and sources of funding for possible publication whether as a monograph or in detailed essays. Longer term this may involve giving papers at conferences and organising academic visits to monuments included in my research.

What advice would you give to someone considering beginning a PhD?

Be passionate about your research subject matter! Remember that the PhD process can be all consuming at times and be prepared for setbacks along the route. The relationship with your supervisor is key to a successful and rewarding project. You will also need a support network of peers and friends to share in the experience

What have you enjoyed most during your time at Birkbeck?

Throughout my studies at Birkbeck I have encountered many inspirational tutors who have greatly stimulated and encouraged me along my academic path. Moreover, the diversity of the students adds interesting dimensions to the scholarly debate both in terms of approach to the discipline as well as previous experience and age. Interacting with students in their early 30s and students in their 70s has been very stimulating. I think Birkbeck is wonderful to offer opportunities for anybody who wants to take up part-time studies with its very wide and flexible range of programmes.

Cynthia Chisom Umezulike is an international human rights lawyer and associate lecturer in law. She is also the Policy Director and Co-chair of Hon. Justice Innocent Umezulike Foundation and recently completed her PhD in law at Birkbeck. In this blog she talks to us about her experiences of studying at Birkbeck.

·   How was your experience doing your PhD at Birkbeck?

At Birkbeck, I gained excellent time management techniques, problem-solving capacity, research information management and value-based competence in fulfilling complex tasks. My PhD supervisor, Prof Bill Bowring continuously challenged my writing and reasoning in pushing the boundaries of critical thinking to make a significant contribution to knowledge. Prof Bowring’s high impact contribution to my overall academic performance is a testament to the overall outcome of my thesis, which Gilchrist Trust Award especially noted as one of the most outstanding PhD thesis across Birkbeck, University of London. 

·   What were the benefits of doing a PhD?

Completing the PhD degree at Birkbeck, has equipped me with the fundamental competence and cognitive skills to make an immediate positive impression in advancing identified core values and objectives. Obtaining a PhD degree has provided an extensive range of career opportunities, and I am now able to compete in senior-level positions successfully. 

·   How did being at Birkbeck benefit your career?

I began my leadership and advocacy training at Birkbeck- awaking my passion and commitment for teaching, digital mobilization and activism, advocacy and human development. I have since independently founded two thriving NGO’s dedicated to advancing socio-economic and cultural rights while working as a human rights and policy director in a third sector organisation. Also, I currently teach foundation and undergraduate Criminal Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law courses at Birkbeck.

·   Why did you choose Birkbeck over other universities?

Birkbeck provided a conducive and vibrant environment for learning and conducting research. The quality of staff and independent program initiatives upholds Birkbeck’s long commitment to producing high performing doctoral candidates. 

·   How did you find the Birkbeck experience overall?

My overall experience at Birkbeck was very positive and has shaped my drive to maintain excellence in conducting high impact research and producing value-based results. I credit my strong academic background, especially the PhD process at Birkbeck for not only developing my critical analytical skills but also instilling the values of hard work, consistency, patience and perseverance. 

Birkbeck’s University Challenge team stormed to victory in the first round of this year’s series. The programme aired on 10^th August, with Birkbeck students facing the University of Reading. They secured a place in the next round with an impressive 295 points to Reading’s 50. Here, we catch up with the contestants Jonathan Willams (MA Classics), Joshua Mutio (MSc Politics, Philosophy and Economics), Jonathan Taylor (MSc Environment and Sustainability) and Nicky Clarke (PhD Early Modern History) on Birkbeck student life and their hopes for the next round… 

Why did you choose to study at Birkbeck? 

Nicky: I did my MA here because I really liked the Early Modern History course and I also liked the idea that I wouldn’t necessarily be the oldest student in the room! 

Jonathan W: I’ve been interested in Classics since my schooldays, and I revived that interest by starting to study Latin and Greek in earnest a few years ago.  I took A-levels in both languages last year and wanted to carry on my studies so Birkbeck was the natural choice.  It has a great reputation in the subject, and it’s the perfect place to study if you want to maintain a career whilst studying.  It’s also close to where I live. 

Joshua: It meant I could study whilst keeping my full-time job as an analyst at NHS England. Plus, Birkbeck was the only university offering my preferred course for evening study, so it was a perfect match. 

Jonathan T: I chose Birkbeck because the course looked very good, and because the approach (part time, evening classes etc.) fitted well with other commitments. 

 What made you apply for University Challenge? 

Jonathan W: I’ve always enjoyed quizzing and am part of a regular pub quiz team. I saw the trials were on at the start of the year, and I thought, “why not? It should be fun!” 

Nicky: I didn’t get the chance to do it many moons ago as an undergraduate so I thought it would be fun to try this time around. 

Joshua: My hopes weren’t high, but I felt I had nothing to lose by auditioning. I‘ve always wanted to have something in common with Stephen Fry, too! 

Jonathan T: I applied for fun! 

What was your strategy ahead of the first round? 

Jonathan W: I think we wanted to cover as many subject areas as we could, so we each chose ones to swot up on.  I plumped for physics and chemistry, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  Not so much now…! 

Joshua: I’m not sure we had one… besides answering as many questions as possible, preferably correctly. 

Nicky: We practiced regularly. 

Jonathan T: Our strategy before the first round included several evenings of practice, we are doing the same now.   

What is Jeremy Paxman like? 

Joshua: A gent.  

Jonathan W: Very charming.  He even offered to show us the way to the studio from the stage door. 

Nicky: Pretty good making at teams feel less nervous. 

Have you filmed any further rounds? Can you give us an idea of how things go…? 

Joshua: Our next match is filmed in a few weeks, but we’ll be sworn to secrecy. 

Nicky: We have only recorded round one. The schedule has been disrupted by Covid and we don’t record again until September. 

What’s life been like since the programme aired? 

Jonathan W: I’ve had lots of lovely messages from people I haven’t been in touch with for ages, so that has been nice. 

Nicky: Much the same as before, though several old friends have said they nearly fell off their sofas when they saw me. 

Joshua: There were some articles about me in the tabloids, and Greg James spoke about me on Radio 1, which was all a bit bonkers. Besides that, totally ordinary. 

Jonathan T: Since the programme aired a surprising number of people have been in touch. It gets one of the largest audiences on BBC2 (around 2 million). 

Do you think that you can go all the way to the final? 

Nicky: To borrow a well-known sporting analogy, we are taking it one game at a time. 

Jonathan W: Absolutely! We’re certainly going to give it our best shot. 

Jonathan T: Too early to say how far we might go, the questions get tougher as the rounds proceed, and teams get quicker on the buzzer. 

Joshua: If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen… 

The team will appear in the next round in September 2020, we wish them the best of luck! 

Beth Greenacre is a successful curator and art consultant working across the industry, including being the Curator for AllBright, a female membership club with bases in London and LA. 

Beth graduated from Birkbeck in 2000 with a Certificate in Arts Management and began working as David Bowie’s Art Curator, a role that she held for 16 years, leading the sale of part of his Collection after his death in 2016. 

Here we hear from Beth about her career, working with David and life in lockdown. 

Tell us more about your current work and role as Curator at the AllBright Club:

I am self-employed and have been for much of my career. It allows flexibility and means you can be nimble. I have a broad range of interests and activities, which allows for variety and keeps me on my toes. However, I do try to make all my work linked in some way; this is fairly easy as the art world is small and very connected. It is in itself a healthy eco-system. 

One of my current roles is advising a commercial gallery, the Michael Hoppen Gallery. This takes up a lot of my time. I was brought on board at the end of summer last year to set out what this medium sized, well established gallery could look like in the future – in terms of technology, online activity, new audiences and an ever-changing market. My appointment was actually good timing in regard to Covid-19, as one of the first things I looked at was the Gallery’s digital and social media strategy, so we were already taking big steps with our online activity. But things will keep changing and having to implement new activity quickly at the moment is quite hard. The art market fascinates me and I really enjoy the business side of art as one strand of my career. 

I also look after a handful of private collections; building, growing and maintaining them. 

Alongside this, I am curator at the AllBright Club, which is a female only members club. We currently have two sites in London, Mayfair and Rathbone, and one in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. LA is quite new, it has been open for less than a year. The AllBright is far more than just a club, they are sites for women to grow, develop and learn together. Of course, at the moment they are an online space, with incredible supportive content for women; whether short courses, round table discussions or talks. There is also a great networking app. In terms of my work with them, I select work by women artists to display, loaning directly from artists, collections, public spaces, print publishers and more. In Mayfair alone, the period on display spans 80 years and includes about 130 artists. The collections and hangs often respond to the sites. For instance, LA looks at the female gaze and how that is filtered through films and movies. I keep as much as I can to local artists and galleries, promoting and representing local voices. 

I also advise artists estates, which stems from the work I did with David. I was his curator for the better part of my career and directed the sales at Sotheby’s of part of this collection on behalf of his estate. I find working with estates really exciting; whether that be legacy planning or making sure that the collections are future proof and can function sustainably.

What was it like being the Curator to David Bowie’s art collection? 

Everyone has some knowledge of David through his music or as an actor. However, I think very few knew him as an Art Collector or what motivated him as a collector. It was a very personal collection, driven by private desires and ambitions, it was very much about his immediate history, and he used the collection to understand his place in the world.

David was a great teacher and looked at the world in a unique way. He used his collection as his way to view or express the things happening around him and he taught me how to do the same. He was also very generous. For instance, he supported young artists through Bowie Art, one of the first ever websites for art, helping recent graduates at the first stage of their career. David understood the power of the internet when others disregarded its; he knew that it could be used in a negative manner, but he also saw its positive potential and reach. 

When I first started working with David, it was after I had graduated from The Courtauld Institute in 1997, before going on to Birkbeck. It is so odd to think that I had no access to email as a student I even wrote my dissertation on a typewrite can you believe? Similarly the art world was very different; imagine London without the Tate Modern! The internet was a new and fantastic thing and David managed to harness that. It was extraordinary to work with him. 

What has been your favourite moment in your career? 

It was difficult for me to oversee the sale of David’s collection after his death. I don’t think I really grieved until after the sale. However, it made me incredibly proud to show people the collection that he had built. We toured highlights around the world and opened Sotheby’s for 24 hr viewing – there were queues around the block and, at the time, it was the highest attended exhibition at Sotheby’s. Seeing the pieces together was amazing; it was a loaning collection, meaning that it was never normally all in one place, and David lived a modest life so there was never room for all the pieces he owned. Brining it together like that really helped to understand the achievement of such a collection. It felt celebratory in a way, and I think that people were granted a means to understand him in a different way via the art he collected and treasured. It was the ultimate sharing experience, which is what David wanted; he always wanted to share his passion for the artists that inspired him.

What advice would you give a student looking to go into the art world? 

Embrace the amazing people in the art world; curators, gallerists, writers, academics, collectors. Don’t be afraid to reach out, the art world is full of generous and passionate people who are glad to offer guidance. It can seem intimidating at first but there are loads of really brilliant people who want to talk and share. 

What area of art do you personally tend to most enjoy? 

I am passionate about modern British painting and sculpture, which was a cornerstone of David’s collection. We would always joke that it was very unfashionable! That has changed in recent years though. I think I like that it tells a history that is close to my own. It’s certainly been underrated and undervalued in the market. There were very similar things being explored by artists across continents at that moment but the USA shouted the loudest. Their market was more established, and they had a stronger institutional network supporting their artists. Many people will know who Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock or Franz Kilne are but far fewer will know of Peter Lanyon or Ben Nicholson.

How has the lockdown effected the art industry so far? 

Part of my work is advising private clients, which at the moment is actually quite busy! I’ve worked through a number of recessions and find that people always want art in their lives. It helps us to understand the world, particularly at times like this. 

I’ve also been amazed at some of the great online content that’s coming out, both from our large art institutions and privately owned galleries. I think people are really connecting with art. And given that some people have more time at the moment, the content is being consumed in a new way. I believe that you have to find opportunities at moments like this! Never waste a crisis. 

Art markets, dealers and auctions have been doing ok- all things considered. For instance, Sotheby’s recently announced their highest grossing online sale, which beat the record set just the week before. We are all of course cautious and sadly some artists, galleries and institutions will struggle. However, the art world is biting at the bit to get going again and make a difference to those that are finding it hard in the current climate. 

What do you think will be the long terms effect of the virus?

I think that many industries are due a re-evaluation as are many aspects of our private lives. And I hope that the current situation will help us to look at our values and consider what is important; and I do not just mean market values. For instance, the art world ships art around the world and jumps on planes at the drop of a hat, to the detriment of our environment. I think things can afford to become more localised and considered. 

I just read a piece by The Business of Fashion in the Financial Times, outlining how the fashion world can have a positive impact on the environment. The article asked for a restructuring of the traditional fashion seasons, so that they weren’t driven by four set timelines. It is this sort of innovation we need.

The online art market has also been developing for a long time and though it will never replace physically engaging with a piece or person, it is a valuable tool that we will have to use more and more.

Why did you choose Birkbeck to study at?  

The flexibility is amazing and the level of teaching is great – I was lucky to have Lisa Lefeuvre for one of my modules, who is a bit of a hero of mine. The idea that I could work and earn money (at the time, in the height of a recession) was ideal. The network at Birkbeck was also really important to me. 

What, do you think, makes Birkbeck special? 

What is really special for me is the fact that it enables and supports those who may not normally get the chance to experience high level education, whether that’s because of economic background, gender, age or academic experience. It’s as democratic an institution as you can get and really does enable people. 

Are there any resources that are helping you at the moment? Podcasts/scheduling apps/exercise classes? 

Really, I have just been increasing the things that have always kept me motivated. I self-isolated for 3 weeks at the start of the virus as I had symptoms, and then I had a big list of things to do; podcasts. writing, reading. However, as a mum of a five year old I am not one of those people who has more time during lockdown, and so sometimes I feel like hero if I manage to put a load of washing on by the end of the day! So, no great revelations,  though I am grateful for yoga (I have managed to master the head stand), meditation and my allotment. I never thought I’d hear myself say that about an allotment! 

And time with my son- one benefit of this situation is that it has enabled me time with him that I would never normally have. Early on we created a ‘be kind’ pact as I didn’t want there to be pressure on me or my son to have to do certain things or reach milestones. I did laugh when he said recently with a big grin on his face: ‘Does lockdown mean art galleries and museums aren’t open?’. That made me realise I probably take him to too many!  

What was the last book you read? 

‘The Secret Lives of People in Love’ by Simon Van Booy. Beautiful and poetic short stories about love which are great for lockdown! I have also read ‘Limelight’, which is Helen Gee’s memoir. Helen set up a photography gallery in Greenwich Village NY, during the 1950s. It was a completely new model for a gallery – also housing a coffee shop – and the first to show photography in a commercial context as art. Pretty inspiring stuff; she was a single mum with determination.

If you would like to tell us what you are doing during lockdown and be featured on our next blog, please email alumni@bbk.ac.uk

Former Birkbeck Student Mickey Mayhew has recently been nominated for the Positive Role Model (Disability) Award at the National Diversity Awards 2020. Mickey was permanently excluded from school aged twelve, with no diagnosis of his autism and thus eventually no qualifications either.

He was later diagnosed with Asperger’s, Autism and Dyspraxia. He then embarked on a hard-won reclamation of his education. From one GCSE and one A-Level, he gained an undergraduate degree followed by three postgraduate Masters (two at Birkbeck) and then a PhD, becoming ‘Dr Mickey Mayhew’, this with the help of his supervisor, Dr Shaminder Takhar.

We caught up with Mickey to find out about his Birkbeck experience and what he is currently up to:

Why did you choose Birkbeck to study at?  

Because of the flexibility of the classes in terms of scheduling and being able to study in the evening. And of course because of the stalwart reputation!

What did you study and why? 

For my first Birkbeck Masters I studied Creative Writing, under Julia Bell and Russell Celyn-Jones, and for my second Masters I studied Gender, Culture and Society with Jonathan Kemp and Paulina Palmer. I wanted to not only be a writer but also continue my undergraduate sociology education.

What were the highlights of your time at Birkbeck? 

Meeting my wonderful classmates and having my mind opened up to so many new possibilities, points of view, and worldly experiences; education really does broaden the mind.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been told? 

Don’t let your disability – and especially anyone else’s view of it – drag you down.

What has been your favourite moment in your career? 

Just getting a job in the first place; when you leave school aged just 12, your CV can appear pretty…pockmarked, to put it mildly. That, and getting my first book published. 

What did you want to be when you were growing up? 

A writer. 

What advice would you give to current students? 

If I can get a Masters degree (or three) and a PhD after being permanently excluded from school as a kid, then I can’t imagine anything that might stop you from achieving your academic goals. 

How has your life changed during the COVID19 crisis? 

My life hasn’t changed all that much during the crisis, because issues of social isolation continue to abound for people with autism regardless. The lockdown may in fact allow people to feel what those with autism experience almost everyday.

If you would like to tell us what you are doing during lockdown and be featured on our next blog, please email alumni@bbk.ac.uk

The following blog is a transcript of a Birkbeck Inspires: Conversations with Alumni Podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here

Hello and welcome to the Birkbeck Inspires conversations with alumni podcast series, where we hear from former students and find out more about their time at Birkbeck. Birkbeck Inspires is the college’s free online events, activities and resources programme which has been designed to inspire learning, provoke thought and entertain and excite curious minds. 

In today’s episode, Victoria Hurwood from Birkbeck’s Development and Alumni team speaks to former student, Siobhan Andrews Kapoor, who graduated from the college with an MA in History of Art in 2009. 

V: Hi Siobhan! 

S: Hi Victoria, how are you? 

V: I’m good thank you, how are you doing? 

S: Good, thank you. 

V: Well, thank you so much for joining me today, I’ve been really looking forward to having a conversation with you just to hear about your experience at Birkbeck, why you chose Birkbeck and your career since. So Siobhan, you studied History of Art in 2009. 

S: I did. Yeah, I did a Masters degree. 

V: Perfect. And you have such an amazing variety of experiences and I’m really excited to just kind of get into it today with you. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself to start? 

S: Yeah, so I have kind of a two-part career. On the one hand, I am a marketing consultant and a creative producer, particularly working in cultural projects, recently I was working with an organic food brand on reversing marketing outreach, and I also work as a wellness coach, so working mostly one on one with clients just to improve their lifestyle. I’ve had some nutrition training and whatnot, so I do that as well at the same time. 

V: That’s amazing. It sounds like such an amazing balance between marketing and then also thinking about the more holistic view of it as well, it sounds like you have a huge experience over lots of different fields. So where are you in the world and how has your life recently changed because of the Covid-19 crisis? 

S: I’m in London. I was in India for the last 4 years, and we’d actually, my husband and I, had just made the move back to London in January, so it wasn’t quite the welcome back that we were imagining! But it’s been nice to be back in the city, and obviously closer to family and everything while this is going on. And yeah, I mean, life has changed for me in the same way that it has for many people. Unfortunately a lot of the projects that I had in the pipeline, a lot of them are events or festivals, a lot of offline happenings, and obviously most of those are not happening, or been delayed, which has been a shame, but still continue working on communications and social media, and then my coaching is still ongoing and actually it seems like people need it more than ever right now and their managing so much more stress and anxiety. So it’s been really nice to kind of have the opportunity to connect with people, and actually really put the tools and practices into effect, in a time when we really need it. So lots has changed, and sort of nothing has changed as well in the same way, so it’s still the same day to day. And because I’ve been freelancing so many years, I’m actually really used to working at home, that doesn’t feel that unusual for me. So yeah, it’s been alright. 

V: Gosh, it sounds like there’s been so much change, but that you’ve almost had the training from being freelance, and you know, having multiple career paths, that you know, it’s hopefully equipped you for this kind of situation as much as you can be. 

S: Yeah, I guess no one’s really equipped for this kind of thing really. But yeah I think having worked in a sort of project by project basis as well, I’m used to things kind of starting and finishing and having to juggle quite a few things all at the same time. And I think when you’re freelance as well you tend to be quite resourceful because you’ve sort of always had to be, because you’re always looking for the next piece of work or whatever so that’s maybe been a skill that’s been helpful at the moment. But yeah, I mean still adjusting I think even after two months or whatever we’re at now. 

V: Oh definitely, I think there’s a long period of adjustment, and it’s such a strange world that we’re in at the moment. With your kind of work with, obviously a lot of offline events, have you found that lots of them have been moved online, as different ways of trying to communicate with your target audiences and things? 

S: Yeah, I mean I’ve obviously seen a lot of people trying to innovate now and work out how they can still engage their community, how they can still provide some meaningful experiences, but you know, how to do that with this situation, so there’s obviously been a big shift over to digital and lots of people trying to do things digitally which I think in some situations works really well, in others it doesn’t translate and I, you know, having worked in events and production for so many years I personally feel there’s nothing like when you get a group of people together in person and it’s just so special, and I’m not sure whether that’s ever going to be able to be recreated in the same way online. But in a way it’s great to have the chance to explore and really see what can be done, but yeah, a lot of projects have been postponed until further notice. So it is difficult not having clarity on a few things, and trying to keep projects ticking along, and the artists that I work with, trying to keep them engaged, but not really knowing when it’s going to be when we’re actually able to put a show on or whatever, so it’s a little bit up in the air, but definitely seeing some innovation and move towards digital platforms, so I am quite interested to see what happens, especially in the art world. I mean we’ve seen, particularly in art fairs, and those things going on in the more commercial space moving online. We’ve just had Frieze New York, so it’s quite nice to be able to attend without having to get on a plane, and that kind of thing! But it’s not quite the same experience, but let’s see, I think we’re at the very start of actually digital innovation, so I’m very interested to see what happens next. 

V: I suppose it does give you that freedom, that sounds amazing, that you can attend events in New York and all over the world, so it does have an international outlook, although I know that you know, some of the artists, and people in the art world in general, are struggling. It’s nice, I guess that’s a different side of accessibility to others, if everything’s online. 

S: Absolutely, yeah. And I think you know, another shift that we’ve seen is more of the arts institutions really taking social media seriously, which is funny because when I was working in commercial galleries, at the beginning of my career, you know galleries wouldn’t, like they didn’t really care about social media, because it wasn’t really speaking to the audience that they were interested in, whereas now I think, you know, they’re really waking up to the fact that there’s all sorts of conversations with all sorts of communities going on, and they need to be part of that to stay relevant, and to sort of leverage the careers of their artists. So, it’s a very interesting thing, a lot of those engaging more on social media and doing more and coming up with interesting content. So yeah, there is some excitement despite everything! 

V: Yeah, I guess that’s a huge period of transition. In terms of Art Week, I do want to plug Birkbeck as doing an Art Week at the moment, so I think a lot of that is online, there’s a lot of lectures, a lot of Q and As and things, and I know that alumni can try and take part  wherever they are in the world. Bringing it back to Birkbeck, so I know that you studied History of Art, an MA. Why did you choose Birkbeck and why History of Art? 

S: Yeah, so my background was in History of Art already, I did my undergrad in History of Art and like I said, I’d actually been working for a few years in commercial galleries before deciding to do a Masters. And, you know, for me, the main reason was practical, I needed to continue working, I actually wanted to continue working, to keep my foot in the door of the art world, and obviously Birkbeck is so perfect for anyone that’s a professional and wants to continue learning. And the other thing that I was really aware of was that I was a little bit older, I mean I wasn’t that much older I was about 25 or 26, but I wanted to be in a group, like a class group, with people that were my age or older, I didn’t want to feel old. And I was really drawn to Birkbeck because obviously they’ve got a great reputation, but also there was just so much diversity and that really came through, even from the open day that I attended, and I really liked that idea, that just to have a real mix of opinions, and not just hearing the same world view and so I was really drawn to it in that regard. 

V: That’s so lovely to hear. And I know that, you know, diversity and diversity of thought, as well as the diversity of people in the room, is so important to Birkbeck, and you know that whole theme of lifelong learning, I think it’s so bizarre now to think that once you finish high school you go straight into your higher education and then that’s you done ready to work in the world. I think it’s such a strange idea. 

S: And for me, you know, the gallery world, or even the wider sort of cultural landscape, it is an industry of research, you know, we are looking, whether it’s even at contemporary artists or historical artists, periods in time, and I think for me I really wanted to upgrade my skills to develop my research abilities, even just down to writing and being able to put a cohesive piece of writing together, that’s really important for me in the work that I was doing, and it’s helped me throughout the whole of my career with curation and production, so yeah, I mean I think the skills were really important to me at that time. 

V: That’s so lovely to hear. When you were at Birkbeck, I know that you actually did it full time while you were working full time as well didn’t you? 

S: I did, yeah and it was a little bit intense. I was very lucky that my employer was really kind and let me reduce my hours a little bit in the end when I was doing my dissertation, because that was where the weight of my mark was going to come from, so she was really understanding and sort of allowed me a bit of free time, but other than that I was going into the gallery that I was at that time for a full day, and then going straight to Birkbeck in the evenings! But you know, I mean, organisational skills are obviously super important, whenever trying to do two things at the same time, so I just had to be really strict with myself and study whenever I could, but it was a challenge and most people on my course were doing part time, but yeah for me it worked out. But I would have probably in hindsight, liked to have spent more time on it, just to sort of enjoy it for longer, because I loved being a student in London. And you know, why do it for one year if you can do it for two? 

V: That’s true! Spread out the joy! I think that’s the thing with Birkbeck. We try and make sure there’s that flexibility around it, so, yeah, I know that some students for example go full time and then decide that they want to go down to part time, or I know a lot of students are doing part time if they’re working full time, it’s just kind of what works best for you. Do you have any highlights from your time at Birkbeck, or a moment that you thought, that was amazing? 

S: Really for me it was just being part of a great group of people. I can’t remember exactly how many were in my year, but I’ve made such great personal connections, and also professional connections. A lot of people were already working in the arts in one way or the other whether it was in a museum, or a magazine, or whatever, and I made great connections that actually really helped in my career after that, and made great friends as well, who you know I’m still friends with today, which is lovely. And like I said, just being a student in London, I’d never been a student in London because I’d studied elsewhere before, and I just think it’s amazing, you know? We’re so spoiled for resources. I could go to all these amazing museum shows, I had so much access even just for nightlife and the overall side of Bloomsbury. There’s nothing like it really! And yeah I just loved it, it was great. And you know, being part of the Birkbeck community but then also having the wider University of London community is also excellent, and being able to use the Senate House library when I wanted, I even used the arts library at UCL at times, you know, and I think you just really feel part of something, and yeah I definitely hadn’t experienced it to that degree previously. So it was a very special year for me. 

V: I’m so glad that you enjoyed it, and I completely agree, I think that Bloomsbury is such an amazing mix of different institutions, educational institutions and people, and you know, everyone’s motivated and studying, and when other universities have students during the day, Birkbeck has it during the evening, so it’s a constant flow of people, and it is, yeah, it is a really special place to be. 

****** 

V: So after you finished Birkbeck, I know that you worked internationally, and you worked in India for a couple of years. What advice would you give to students or alumni that want to have a more international career? 

S: Yeah, so I was in Delhi, actually it was 4 years, it was longer, it didn’t feel that long actually! But I was quite lucky because I actually went to India on sabbatical, and just wanted to go travelling. I was really just taking a bit of a break from the company that I’d been running before. And I sort of accidentally ended up positioning myself sort of an India expert, which was totally not my intention of going on sabbatical, but an ex-client of mine got in touch because she knew I was there and she had a project that needed someone to work on it in India on the ground, and she asked me if I could get involved. So my experience is definitely, it was a serendipitous one, but I would say that you know, that really speaks to the fact that if you show yourself to be interested, or you know sort of an expert in the country or the place that you want to move to, then you actually just set yourself apart from the rest. Especially in a country like India which is quite difficult to integrate into, and if you’re from outside it seems kind of impenetrable. So definitely thinking about where you want to be and then just really throw yourself into some research you know? Connect with people as much as you can, which we can still do online, you know LinkedIn and whatnot. I’ve actually recently joined another networking website that might be helpful for people, which is called Lunchclub. You basically join as a member, and they match you week by week with different people that you can have like a 45 minute Skype call with, so you are matched with people in your industry if you want that, but it’s great, I’ve met people in New York and then all over the UK, so I think you know, doing what you can to network in the country or the city that you’d like to work in, and then of course, looking at the companies that you might want to join and seeing, do they have an international presence, do they have offices in a city that I might be interested in transferring to one day, and yeah just being a bit strategic when it comes to applying for jobs and looking for opportunities, and you know, even if there’s no work opportunity then think about volunteering or getting involved in a project that you might be able to support from afar. The great thing right now is that I think lots of people are, there’s no boundaries anymore, everyone’s doing everything online, why not do something for someone in America? It’s no different to doing something for someone down the road, so it’s actually a great time I think to work with international communities, so yeah, definitely looking around seeing what you can get involved with is good. 

V: That’s fantastic, so many great pieces of advice there, and I suppose, yeah, now is as good a time as any to reach out to people and try and make those connections. I suppose there is so much you can do even before you get to the country that you’d like to be in that you can do online. 

S: Absolutely. 

V: So yeah, no that’s absolutely fantastic. And I know that, you know, everybody has a lot of time at the moment, free time, so hopefully it will aid those connections a little bit more.  

S: Yeah, I think you’re likely to get quicker LinkedIn responses at the moment! 

V: I think so! I definitely think so. That’s one benefit, you know, everyone’s just looking on LinkedIn, having a scroll! In terms of having more free time, what kind of activities or hobbies, or books or anything, has there been anything that’s helped you during lockdown at the moment? 

S: Yeah, I mean I really like walking, and just getting out into nature is a huge, it’s just so helpful at the moment. And we’re very lucky where we are, we’re not far from Hampstead Heath in north London, so I’ve just been able to get out almost every day for a long walk, and you know I actually love listening to podcasts and audio books and I do that on my walk sometimes. There’s actually, there’s a few really good podcasts that I listen to regularly, and one of them kind of speaks to this sort of, you know, multistrand career that we’ve been talking about, which is called ‘Amazing If’, is the podcast, I think that’s right. It’s by two women who wrote a book called Squiggly Careers, and it’s all about, they both have marketing backgrounds, but it’s all about people who sort of have these hybrid roles, where they’ve kind of dipped from one industry to another, or one kind of role or department to another. When I came across their book originally, it really was like a lightbulb moment for me, because I was like, oh my God, that’s me! You know, that’s how I’ve been working, and I’ve always found it really difficult to explain the different things I do and the different interests I have, so I’ve been listening to that podcast, it’s weekly, so that’s a great one. And really helpful for career advice, they give very strong career direction, and really thoughtful episodes, so that one I definitely recommend. And there’s another one by an American writer called Gretchen Rubin, that podcast is called ‘Happier by Gretchen Rubin’. She wrote a book called The Happiness Project, which I think is one of her first big books, and another one which she’s written more recently is called Better than Before. And she’s really looking at kind of, lifestyle upgrades, and just how we can function in a better way, and kind of have more fun and be happier, that’s the focus of her happier project. But it’s very interesting psychology-based lifestyle improvement books I guess. I don’t know if that makes it sound a bit self-happy, but its not! The episodes are really really good, so yeah I recommend that as well. And like everyone I’m just busy cooking, you know! Which has been nice. And yeah, just like I said, trying to be outdoors as much as I can. I know it’s difficult, especially when you’re in a city, but the nice thing is just being to kind of, there’s less traffic, so we’re just walking down the middle of the road when we can! 

V: That’s nice! It must be really surreal and kind of strange just walking down, being like a few months ago this was absolutely packed. These sound like amazing podcasts, anyone who knows me knows I love podcasts, I’ve not heard of those two so I’ll definitely look them up and see. 

S: And if anyone’s interested in nutrition and that kind of more style of lifestyle things, there’s also a podcast by Deliciously Ella, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, but she’s quite a big food influencer and brand, and her weekly podcast is also really nice if you’re looking for anything particularly nutrition, food based that’s a really nice one as well. 

V: I’ve heard her speak before actually about her own kind of journey, it’s really inspiring, and kind of figuring out what worked best for her. I think that’s kind of how Deliciously Ella came into being, and I think she’s a really engaging person to listen to. 

S: Yeah, absolutely. I think anyone with interesting stories, and actually all of the women, and yeah they’re all women, I didn’t really mean to do that! But they’ve all kind of got interesting backgrounds and they’re all sharing what they’ve been through, and I think it just feels very authentic, and I think at this time it’s really helpful to sort of have, at least for me, to have reflective things to listen to. 

V: I’ll definitely tune in! That’ll be me on my walk today, I’ll go and have a look at them. So I guess you’ve also been involved with Birkbeck through our alumni volunteer and get talking programme, and I know that we originally met on an open day where you were part of an alumni panel, have you enjoyed your part in these programmes, and what benefits do you think there are with being involved in Birkbeck in this way? 

S: Yeah, I mean I’ve loved being a part of it, and actually its funny because it’s something I’d wanted to do, I’d wanted to volunteer for Birkbeck for years but because I was in Delhi, and so many things were offline, I wasn’t able to get involved, and then the funny thing is now I’m in the city but I’m doing everything online with everyone! Apart from obviously the open day, which I did in person. But yeah, I mean I love being part of it, and I really felt for a long time that I wanted to do something to help support new students and you know, really just stay involved in what Birkbeck was doing. I’ve always really strongly believed in the university, and the sort of widening the access for education, and anything I can do to sort of help support new students and making sure that they had a sort of easy route in, that was why I really wanted to get involved. And the Get Talking programme that I was just part of recently, I mean it was great. I was speaking to a woman who is joining in the new academic year who lives in Botswana, and she’s moving her, I’m not sure, maybe she’ll be online to begin with, but she’s moving her whole family to London, and she’d never been to the city before, she’d never been to the UK! And you know, I ended up sort of describing Bloomsbury to her, and trying to tell her what her route from her flat to the college is going to be, and I think, just having a human person that you can just like have a really normal conversation with about such mundane things you know, like, where do you get your coffee from? And what’s it like? And you know, it was really nice to just be able to fill in a little bit of the gaps, just to sort of illustrate it a little bit to her and yeah, it was just a really nice opportunity so hopefully I’ll stay involved in an ongoing way. But yeah, I think any alumni who really enjoyed their experience, you know, we’ve all got career experience, we’ve all got something that we can share, you know, so it’s a really nice chance to do that. 

V: I’m so glad that you enjoyed it, and we absolutely loved having you part of it. I think there’s no better people to give you a really truthful insight to what Birkbeck is, than the people who have already gone through the process, so I think it’s so valuable and we’re so appreciative of people who want to get involved in this way. I can imagine, I’ve studied abroad before, and gone abroad, and it always seems like such a strange experience where you’re just looking things up online and you’ve not got a person who’s been through it and experienced it, so it kind of adds that character and a bit more colour to what Birkbeck is. 

S: Yeah absolutely. I mean this student she was sort of early 40s and she was quite concerned that she might be old in her group, and it’s just, I think I was really helpful for her to hear no, that in my experience there was such a range of people. We had a 70 year old on our course, so you know it was nice to be able to tell her that and to put any fears that she might have to rest. 

V: Yeah that’s interesting. We do have such a wide-ranging age between people. I know that lots of people for example all the time think, oh now’s the time I really wanted to learn history or things like that, and they come into Birkbeck, and I think that’s what makes it so rich, there’s so many different people at so many different stages of career and their life that you know, its just a really great experience to not only benefit from the academic excellence of Birkbeck, but also the people that make it what it is, and I guess that led on to my next question that I’d like to ask about, what you think makes Birkbeck special? 

S: I mean for me, I was always drawn to Birkbeck because I just really resonated with the principles of the college, and like we’ve already said I think access to education is really important. And I think, you know, the more liberal, the more diverse mindset definitely aligns with my own values. And you know, Birkbeck clearly makes it as accessible as possible whilst keeping that academic excellence that you mentioned, and you know I think just the supportive nature of the staff and you know, it just really feels like a community, hence still wanting to be involved with it 10 years later or whatever! But definitely just the diverse mix of people, and I think there’s always so much scope for invention and you know, thinking about things in a new way, when you have a great mix of people who are coming from research backgrounds, you know there’s so many accomplished people who are part of Birkbeck, from the tutors down to the students, so yeah I think I was really drawn to that, and that ethos just really runs through everything Birkbeck does I think, so yeah it was perfect for me. 

V: Oh good, I’m so glad, and you know I completely agree with everything you’ve said, I think it’s wonderful! No I really do, it’s a really special place to be. And I guess, to wrap up our conversation, what is the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been told? 

S: Yeah, so, I was thinking what’s really stuck with me, and funnily enough when I was doing my A Level exams, which was a long time ago, my mum said to me before going in, I was really nervous before going in, my mum said, you can only do as well as you can do on the day. And it’s actually really stayed with me because, it’s not just about you know, everything relies on this one exam and I’ve got to turn up, but it’s actually about the preserving and the turning up the next day and doing your best, and turning up the day after that and doing your best, you know, we all have bad days and good days, but I just really like the idea that, yeah, some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad, but if you keep persevering, that’s actually what carries us through and through that we do really great things, so I think that the thing that’s really stayed with me. 

V: And such a valuable lesson to learn at such a young age, you know, to have that perseverance to keep going, it obviously really relates to what we’re experiencing at the moment and you know, trying to make little steps towards we’re all working on at the moment, but also just kind of, throughout your career as well. 

S: Absolutely, and it’s ok to fail  you know, and its actually good in a way, because then you develop that muscle that allows you to still get up and do it again the next day, even though the day before wasn’t that good, you know? So I think that really is a great lesson, because everyone fails you know? Everyone has a day which isn’t good. So well done mum! 

V: I know, that’s amazing! Amazing piece of advice to be told at that age! So that’s brilliant. Well Siobhan thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today and I really enjoyed speaking to you. 

Well that’s the end of today’s podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening. Make sure you check out what else Birkbeck Inspires has in store, by visiting our website at bbk.ac.uk/Birkbeck-inspires.  

The following blog is a transcript of a Birkbeck Inspires: Conversations with Alumni Podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here

Hello, and welcome to the Birkbeck Inspires conversations with alumni podcast series, where we hear from former students and find out more about their time at Birkbeck. Birkbeck Inspires is the college’s free online events, activities and resources programme – which has been designed to inspire learning, provoke thought, and entertain and excite curious minds. 

In this episode, Victoria Hurwood interviews Birkbeck alumnus, Prince Louis of Luxembourg, who studied psychosocial studies at the college back in 2017. 

Victoria: Thank you so much Louis, for speaking to me today and for being part of our kind of Birkbeck Inspires conversation with alumni series. What I’d really like to speak to you about today is your time at Birkbeck. So, I know that you’ve studied psychosocial studies in 2017- 

Prince Louis: That’s right. 

Victoria: And just hear more about your experience and your career since, of where that’s taken you. But first of all before we jump into any questions, could you just tell us a little bit more about yourself? 

Prince Louis: Louis from Luxembourg, I’m 33 at the moment, (I did) my Masters degree, my MA in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University. Before that, I was doing something completely different I was in aeronautics, I was in environmental management, I was in communications and within the humanitarian field. When I did the Psychosocial Studies degree, I did the degree within 2 years – night classes in order to be able also to work for a start-up that did impact investing, so you could say that my background is quite diverse! Birkbeck was incredibly helpful in my development, Psychosocial Studies was a lot of things it was a massive headache-  

Victoria: (*Laughs*) 

Prince Louis: – from all the information that was given to us and then contradicted and then not looking at coherence think of other subject, compare and contrast, dismantle theories. I mean its incredibly interesting, its incredibly interesting to see how we can use these theories in many ways, to use these theories in professional coaching. What I do is a mixture, it’s a mixture of professional coaching which I started with (?), he took me on the train, he taught me the job, taught me how to act as a professional coach, what it meant, what it entailed. The other angle that I took is with a woman that’s called Beatrice Sauvageot, she has been studying this lecture for 30 years and more, and finding new understanding to what this lecture is. And, so how to evolve with it, how to help it, how to use it. And so what I did was to being 2 theories: the professional coaching on one side with anything that entails and all the different elements where psychoanalysis is used as basis for everything that is done. Then on the other side, Beatrice Sauvageot’s understanding of dyslexia, and I created and tailor made a service for dyslexics in order to help them – in order to professionally coach them. I can do that with anybody, I do that with anybody but my focus and speciality is within dyslexia because I am dyslexic; because I have been through it; because I have gained a lot of knowledge on it, my children are dyslexic. But most of all because the partnership I did with Beatrice Sauvageot which brought me a huge amount of understanding that I had never really put a finger on, or an understanding that I knew to a certain extent but never acknowledged. And so that’s what I tried to help dyslexics do, is try to help them understand and acknowledge what is part of the dyslexia, what is part of their personality, what is part of their strengths, what is part of their weaknesses. And I do that especially for dyslexics because they have been hounded on with what they cannot do, where their weaknesses lie without ever putting any effort or strengths or knowledge of what they are GOOD at. So I tried to shift that a bit, make them understand what they have been through, for being confronted by their weaknesses on a constant state and trying to make them understand that dyslexia is not only a weakness but more than that, it is mostly not a weakness. It can be and should be considered a strength.  

Victoria: That’s fantastic. You’ve kind of touched on so many elements that Birkbeck also works on, and its part of our mission to make sure that we’re, you know, got diversity in our student population and got diversity of thoughts. We are making sure that people with dyslexia but also people with other neuro-diversity related conditions, that they are able to first of all recognise it and recognise what they can excel at. So it’s exactly as you’re speaking, its turning the conditions into strengths and figuring out what people’s strengths are. It sounds like you, yourself, you have such a diverse background and you were doing so many different things before you came to Birkbeck – can you tell us a little bit more about your experience of education before Birkbeck? How did you find it, where did you go? 

Prince Louis: I’ve been all over the place, I went to (well, I don’t know how far you want to go but,) once I finished at the American School of Luxembourg, I went to Switzerland and got my college education there. As a dyslexic, nothing was easy at all but I managed, and I managed not alone but with a lot of help. That’s a quality I have which I take and put a lot of emphasis on, I take it very seriously and that’s the quality of asking for help when I need it. There is no shame in that and it really is an intelligence in itself to know where your limits lie. And my limits do not lie in understanding, understanding is perfect that’s my strength, my it lies within details and within writing – the comprehension of small details if that makes sense. But it is all about always asking why, I need to know why and that is my strength, afterwards always understanding exactly how I got to that understanding with every single detail which is less interesting than the knowledge required itself. And the knowledge that I acquire, I can continue to the next knowledge and to the next knowledge and to the next. Those knowledges will justify the knowledge I had to begin with. 

Victoria: I think that it shows that you’re curious and that’s so important when you’re coming into new, well trying out different things and trying out different topics and things to study and it sounds like yeah, I wonder actually the flexibility you said about working in a start-up before you were at Birkbeck, and actually while you where at Birkbeck, did the flexibility of evening study help you in that way? And if so, how did it help you, was it good with time management, things like that? What were your difficulties?  

Prince Louis: So, yes the flexibility is incredibly important for me, that’s why I couldn’t work in a business structure, no problem at all, but I find a lot more pleasure in being an entrepreneur and being completely flexible with what I do, how I do it and my time management. To be able to manage my time and be consistent within the work I do, with how I manage that work and time, sot that there is no issue whatsoever. And yes, for Birkbeck to do it in 2 years, to have night classes, yes it was hugely beneficial.   

Victoria: So, what were some of the highlights when you were studying? Do you have a particular class that you really enjoyed, a lecture, a really good grade that you got, does anything stand out to you when you think of Birkbeck? 

Prince Louis: When I think of Birkbeck, it was my final dissertation, it was my final paper which was on mentalities and relations to food. So, I had a lot of confidence because I took the extreme and I did it in relation to insects: to what degree can there be a flexibility within the food we eat. What I love to do is bring a lot of notions together into one subject, that’s exactly what I did, I brought the knowledge of gentleness in order to counter disgust and many others. And so yes that’s the pinnacle of my studies because that’s when I could really use what I learnt and really understand it more deeply. So yes, that’s what I enjoyed the most but the teachers also absolutely wonderful, the entire experience I had was fascinating.  

Victoria: I’m so glad that you enjoyed it and I suppose that is a really challenging time trying to take all of that theory and putting it together, but I’m really glad that you enjoyed it and it sounds like an incredible, well a really interesting topic and I think that is exactly what Birkbeck is about. Its about questioning norms, its about thinking about different or approaching things in different ways and I’m glad to hear you had that experience. So, once you graduated from Birkbeck, you have touched on this before and you got into kind of coaching individuals with dyslexia – you mentioned this before about your own personal experience and thinking about / understanding your strengths and how to excel in the workplace. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you hope to make an impact, and just a bit more about work in this area? 

Prince Louis: Of course. So, well I hope to make an impact for dyslexics but more broadly in self-knowledge, in self-understanding at a point here in life because we change constantly, but at one point in life when we are looking for something or we are just looking for understanding and yeah its constant. There are a lot of confrontations between a person where they are incoherent or inconsistent in many ways and one of the main elements of that is the will to be, and the fear of being, the fear of disappointing others, the fear of being a disappointment to ourselves. But Shakespeare said ‘to be or not to be’ and that is the question, and hopefully to be and not to be because of the fear of being or the fear of being a disappointment. And so, I try to give to a certain extent, self-confidence and prove to people why they have the right to be self-confident enough in order to choose to be and to be themselves and to act within their interests and their evolution and we never perfect, I’m sure, in what we do and who we are, we can to certain degree understand, and with understanding, there is a certain ability to let go. And on the other side, I do also mediation and mediation is a wonderful tool also in order to try and decrease conflict and to not reduce but resolve conflicts in applicable ways. That is also a passion of mine, in fact its more on the day-to-day thing, its not one day hope to change a huge thing but its changing one thing at a time, being able to help in a certain at a certain point in time, a certain person or conflict. It’s that which fascinates me, which gives me drive and gives me passion because at the end of the day, we have the present moment to work with and the future, I always look into it because I love imagining things. And not only looking into the future with the knowledge that I know but the only thing I have in order to a certain degree, is control. 

Victoria: That’s wonderful. This is a really lovely conversation to have on a Friday, I think it’s very uplifting, it’s a very wonderful way to look at the world and kind of reflect your actions and what you’re doing in that kind of view of the world. You talk a lot about confidence building and at Birkbeck that’s something we try to do a lot of. Sometimes people have not come through traditional routes of education, and once they get to Birkbeck, there is the fear of the unknown I suppose and no knowing how they’ll get on. It is a hard thing now in education. Do you find that when you’re coaching people, that once you’ve bridged that barrier of confidence building, you start to kind of see people flourish and thrive? 

Prince Louis: Yes, I mean, yes of course. One thing also is that the fear when you enter a new path in your life, there’s a certain fear, a certain excitement, fear of the unknown as you said, but that’s very good also. Don’t want to destroy that! It’s a very exciting and its what brings change and its part of life and it is an exciting part of life, change itself.  Now it is the fear of change that would be the issue but not the excitement of fear when there is change. We say that it is the fear that’s the issue not the fear itself. We are the fear, we can accept it we go for it, the fear of being afraid or the fear of that feeling of fear and we never want to feel it. We block or we run away from it, the feelings and everything that we go through and everything that’s new, we should never think that we are going to go into something new without a certain level of doubt or fear of the unknown as you said. That’s very entirely normal. But, without it paralysing somebody if we are too afraid of feeling fear or too afraid of being afraid, it’s the fear of fear, not fear itself.  

Victoria: That’s a really good point actually, I guess its that anticipation and you make really good points about when there’s that moment of change there’s that excitement and that new things can happen and flourish. I hope that’s what we can bring to lots of Birkbeck students when they are starting and also when you’re graduating these are all different times you are experiencing massive change and I hope that Birkbeck really supports student alumni in that area. You talk a lot about change, I suppose right now we are going through a grat period of change. Is there anything you do to take yourself into the present, is there anything you really enjoy whether that be a hobby or music? What’s helped you to stay in the present right now? 

Prince Louis: Well, to stay in the present, most of the time is to take myself lightly. I don’t take myself seriously and that has helped to have a great grasp on the present moment and what’s concrete and what’s not. So, if I am able to take myself lightly, I take less care about what other peoples view is on me and what it could be. [Unintelligible] Moving forward, a certain sense of the notion of others is important, but in order to be able to take oneself lightly, not take oneself too seriously, one needs to have something that one takes seriously otherwise it’s just going crazy- 

Victoria: [*Laughs*] 

Prince Louis: – and the centre of reality yet again. And so, its that choice as to what is it that I will take seriously in order to be free not to take myself seriously which is the question. 

Victoria: Yes, definitely. And I guess there is that surrendering to what you can control and what you can’t control and making sure that you what you can do in the present is serving you and also some of the people around you. And everything else, you know, you have to… Yeah. It’s a very strange time but you make some very, very good points. Bringing it back to Birkbeck, what do you think, I know that you’ve had lot of different experiences and different forms of education but what do you think makes Birkbeck particularly special or stand out? 

Prince Louis: Diversity. The diversity, not only the people that are there, which is a great strength, but within the education itself. Its great diversity, there’s great hope and there’s openness of the mind which must stay to accept everything and every theory and everything new. We can only move forward if we are allowed to debate about everything, and the day we are not allowed to debate about something is the day we get stuck into something. So, this openness of mind and this ability to debate in order to truly understand. As not to stay in the ‘politically correct’ but the optically correct that we understand. Where there’s understanding attached to it is 0incredibly important, its like legal structures and any law – if it is not understood and we follow it blindly its stupidity.  We have to understand, bring logic to everything and continue being curious about things! Not saying no it’s a law and that’s it. Not saying oh no it’s a theory we can’t say that. No. Why? Continue asking why.  

Victoria: That’s so lovely and I definitely do feel that reflects diversity as well and you need to be able to debate these things and also when you’re studying to be able to speak to people about different theories that we are all going through it together so that’s really lovely. I guess when you’re thinking more about students today, what advice would you give to Birkbeck students now?  

Prince Louis: Now, to stay open minded. Stay flexible. To study like crazy of course as everyone should! As I should have done a bit more also. But it’s a fun experience. Also, to have fun with it! We are there because we chose what we are interested in and let’s be interested in it. Stay passionate about that subject even though there are ups and downs and that’s normal. But the subject interests are enough in order to study it or know why we study it, that’s fine as well. If the subject sometime is not the greatest interest that we have but we know why we do it and that is the most interesting part and stay passionate about it also. Stay focused on it and yeah! But again, search for freedom within it.  

Victoria: That’s so lovely and I think it’s a really positive message to give to students right now and I love the way that you’ve spoken about Birkbeck and tired to make sure to stay open minded and take advantage of the flexibility, build your confidence and have fun. I think that’s great. Thank you, Louis! 

Well that’s the end of todays podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening. Make sure you check out what else Birkbeck Inspires has in store by visiting our website: bbk.ac.uk/birkbeck-inspires. 

Susan Adams is Associate Director at Coulson Partners, a strategic advisory firm founded by Andy Coulson. She completed the joint Birkbeck and Central Saint Martins MBA programme in spring 2019.

How has your life changed during the COVID-19 crisis?
Well, my world has become much smaller for one, in terms of both people and geography. Thankfully work has continued almost as normal, and my laptop has become a window into far off and previously unknown places – including the living rooms and home offices of colleagues and clients. It’s been good I think for all of us to share a bit more of ourselves and seeing – not always intentionally over zoom – each others’ partners, kids and dogs.

How has the lockdown affected your work/company you work for?Being a strategic advisory firm, we could move quickly and smoothly to home working so in practical terms we continued uninterrupted really. All our clients have been affected in one way or another by Covid, but it’s not all crisis communications. We needed to be agile – getting across Government announcements, major staff safety and customer service challenges, monitoring industry-wide developments – all while staying focused on the big picture, long-term strategic goals. Context is everything when you’re trying to build trust and connection with audiences that matter to you. Some of our clients have been able to make such a positive contribution in a difficult time, and it’s great to be a small part of it.

Did you learn lessons about your work/life balance at Birkbeck that can be applied to the current situation we are all in?  
Yes, that you have to have one! I also discovered when I work best and when it’s simply pointless sitting in front of the computer waiting for inspiration to strike.

Why did you choose Birkbeck to study at?  What did you study and why? 
I was looking for an MBA with a difference – the Birkbeck collaboration with Central Saint Martins offered that, as well as a powerful combination of two globally respected, pioneering institutions. With the world of work changing so much, and the need for leaders to adapt and change too, the MBA seemed to bring together the best of the more traditional business school with art school innovation. I also needed a programme I could do while I was working full time, and Birkbeck is the best place for that.

What were the highlights of your time at Birkbeck? 
Definitely the people. Students, lecturers and staff. To be challenged constantly in such a supportive space.

What, do you think, makes Birkbeck special? 
There’s something special about the opportunity it gives us to get on in our lives when we might not otherwise have the chance – whether that’s getting into university for the first time, making study possible alongside family or work commitments, or doing your second or third degree for enjoyment in later life. I loved doing my dissertation at the Library, there seemed to be a real sense of a collective endeavour to go places.

Where has studying at Birkbeck taken you/How did your qualification help you?
It took me to the job I have now at Coulson Partners. But it’s not just a piece of paper, it helps me do my job with confidence, and to hold my own with some of the smartest and most demanding people I’ve worked with. Every day I’m thinking strategically, ambitiously and creatively for clients and also helping to grow a business I really believe in. Without the Birkbeck experience I’d still be giving it a good go, but possibly not enjoying it as much as I do.

What advice would you give to current students?
Make the most of it. And take a lot of confidence from the fact you’re already on the first step to the next stage of your life and career.

If you would like to tell us what you are doing during lockdown and be featured on our next blog, please email alumni@bbk.ac.uk