“What do you want to do when you grow up?
What do you want to do when you grow up? That’s a question I still ask myself and I’m nearly thirty. No one ever tells you that it’s okay to have uncertainty; that you don’t have to have it all figured out. Uncertainty is vulnerability and vulnerability is weakness they say. Well, I don’t buy it. Uncertainty and vulnerability are honesty and honesty is strength. In the absence of certainty we should do the one the one thing that we can be sure about – we should do what we care about.
That is the short version of what I told a group of year 11’s when I was invited to speak to them as they moved out of high school and onto other things. This was the High School that I went to, the High School where I would smoke sneaky cigarettes by the gate, tell teachers to fuck off when I didn’t get what I wanted and where I spent a whole lot of time comparing myself to my wealthier friends.
How did I go from that girl to a woman being sought out by the same school to come and inspire the next generation? Well, in the 11 years I had been away a whole lot had changed. I’ve got a PhD,I’m writing a book and I run an award winning community engagement project.
But in reflecting back on the past 11 years for that speech I felt I had nothing to say to these year 11s. I felt fraudulent. I felt that I’d just kind of fallen into where I am now. ‘I got lucky’ was what I used to say to people. But then when I sat down and actually thought about it I realised that, it wasn’t luck, it was a lot of hard work and a whole load of passion for what I was doing.
I felt that science was interesting but that it didn’t really click with me. For me, it was all about the humanities. I loved learning about the Vietnam war – at the time I’d just discovered Rage Against the Machine and I suspect my Mum was worried I was going to grow into a communist revolutionary (which is really only partly true). People will tell you that studying the humanities will be a waste of time and that you’ll never get a job with them. Well let me let you in on a secret. Those people are lying to you. The humanities opens up the world to you. You start to see the world for what it really is. You can identify problems and enact change. The humanities gives you the skills to keep learning well beyond the time you will be at university. It gives you the skills a whole bunch of employers will appreciate. If you want any proof all you need to do is check out Rose Lock’s blog post about this topic.
It was in studying for a degree in the Humanities (BA in Sociology and Politics of Contemporary Culture to be precise) that I started to realise what I care about. I care about people and their politics, people and their power, and people and their oppression. At university I discovered race studies, and class studies, I discovered the thing that changed my life, feminism. There was finally stuff that I really cared about! Now I have a job where I get to fight for change all day long. I run a community group that fights for girl empowerment, I teach on a degree programme that teaches students like the one I was. I get to tell people that they matter all day everyday.
Writing a PhD is hard. But then so is a whole bunch of stuff you encounter in life. You just can’t do it if you don’t care about it. You can’t do it without friends because they keep you sane. You can’t do it without family because they are the ones that remind you what it important in life. And this might go without saying, but you can’t do it without looking after yourself.
I got to this point because I worked really I hard and I had people around me who kept telling me that I could do stuff. I’m doing well in my career not because I knew what I wanted but because I loved what I was doing. It was easier for me back then, my fees are a fraction of what you will pay now and I was still terrified of them. The system is stacked against you now, which is all the more reason to tell it to do one and make something with the opportunity you’ve got.”
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