Who are you?

When you meet someone new in a social situation they will invariably ask, ‘what do you do?’.

It’s almost seen as a common courtesy, like asking a taxi driver if he’s had a busy night when you are heading home. When we are asked what we do we often reply with our job title. 

This has always struck me as strange, because a job title is only a tiny bit of what anyone would think they ‘do’. Yet people tend to identify themselves by their job title and tend to categorise others in the same way. My job title is that of a research and teaching assistant on the Working with Children and Families programme. I wouldn’t say that I ‘do’ research and teaching assisting though. I do a lot of things depending on where I am and who I’m with. Whilst I enjoy my job and find it fulfilling, it’s just part of my week and its primary purpose is to pay the bills and keep me well fed.

Prior to working here, I was a youth worker, I had spent the previous five years working in Liverpool, Manchester and Salford with young people who are involved in the criminal justice system.  I had no intention of ever being an academic, of lecturing or conducting research. This career path was never planned or contemplated, it’s an unlikely coincidence of time, opportunity and circumstance. 

When I started working at the University of Cumbria I was self-conscious about my identity, and how I would fit into an academic environment. I didn’t feel like I was bred to be an academic, having left school at sixteen I didn’t do anything productive for many years and got back into education relatively late in life. 

I didn’t feel that I lacked academic ability or intelligence, I have a first class honours degree, many years of experience working with challenging young people and a post graduate teaching qualification. It didn’t seem to matter though, academics seemed like they were a different breed, scary unflappable people who only exist between the hours of 9 – 5 with the sole purpose of being clever. They appeared to be part of an elite club that surely wouldn’t allow someone who spends his free time in the snooker club and at football games to enter. 

If 5 years ago I had been in a social situation, had asked someone what they did and they told me they were a lecturer, my immediate reaction would have been to think that there could not possibly be anything that I would have in common with them and looked around for a ‘normal person’ to speak to. It took me a while to understand but my conceptions were wrong: academia, when it is done correctly isn’t and should never be an exclusive club and the ‘members’ aren’t strange people (well most of them aren’t). Each lecturer you get taught by will have an excellent amount of knowledge and experience that they are able to pass onto you, they are however ‘normal’. They just happen to be well trained people in relation to a specific area of knowledge. If you ask the average academic what they think about Carlisle United playing 1 up front at home and they may just look at you blankly, I’ve tried. 

Ask them something else relating to their field of expertise and you may elicit a response which is well thought out, has depth and is full of criticality. Academics are intelligent people in the main, that intelligence however is often channeled into a very specific subject area, if you were to spend your life researching and reading you to would have this subject specific knowledge. 

We all have the similar capabilities and share the capacity to think critically, you may have to learn how to write academically but I firmly believe everyone who engages on a degree programme has the ability and potential to succeed.

If anyone reading this doubts their potential to achieve academically then you shouldn’t, you can achieve great things if you apply yourself. There isn’t an exclusive intellectual club, everyone is a member of the learning community and everyone’s input is unique and should be valued. 

Think how you would feel being asked what they do now and saying ‘I’m a university student’ and whether that sums up everything about you. A part of you does assume that identity. In the next few weeks if you meet someone new and they say what do you do and you tell them you’re a degree student, think about what that means to you, how you assume that role for part of your identity. You know it isn’t all you ‘do’ but you can be proud to say it and you can feel you can be that person.

Don’t be scared of anyone, speak up and speak out, your thoughts and opinions are respected, don’t be afraid to disagree and challenge, we aren’t always right. 

If you apply these rules to university and to life, then you won’t go far wrong.