Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all of the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blogpost is by Dr Sinéad Murphy, Policy Engagement Coordinator at University College London. You can find Dr Murphy on LinkedIn here, and you can find out more about the UCL Public Policy team here. The team are also on LinkedIn here.
Name: Sinéad Murphy
Doctorate subject area and year of completion: PhD Comparative Literature, 2019
Role and employer: Policy Engagement Coordinator, University College London
Approximate salary bracket of this type of role: This varies widely and pay is greater in London (and the public sector typically includes a London Weighting Allowance). I would estimate the range for a full-time role in London to be in the region of £37,000 – £45,000 per annum.
I recently took up a new role in University College London’s Public Policy team as their Policy Engagement Coordinator. For me this is an energising developmental step having spent twelve years in the higher education sector in a range of roles, including academic teaching and research, learned society management, research administration, and professional services. While this role is a lateral move in some ways, the through line connecting the jobs I have held in higher education is the deep sense of fulfilment I derive from working in settings which stimulate learning and aim to serve the public. Either that, or I went to school and enjoyed it enough to never really leave!
I have always loved words, writing, and reading – my mother likes to tell people that by the age of two, I would bite pretzels into shapes resembling letters of the alphabet. It was true to form that when I got the opportunity to undertake a PhD, I chose the field of Comparative Literature – but this was also a departure from the lack of access to higher education previous generations of my family had experienced. My peers and I benefited significantly from the Irish government’s policy of not passing undergraduate course fees on to students, which in turn made progressing to MA-level study more accessible. Having moved to the UK after the 2012 reforms, my support for equity of access to higher education is all the more keen.
Perhaps this background is why I felt just as strongly about taking a break in my education after my MA as I did about the goal of entering academia. Over a three-year period, I held roles in student services, the international office, and university research and impact. This experience was pivotal to developing a much broader understanding of the higher education ecosystem, what it meant to be a researcher, and the different pathways into a career in academia. Remaining in a university setting enabled me to access support from my former department, identify early opportunities for publishing, participate in conferences, and build my network. I would not have been in a position to undertake my PhD without acquiring funding, and I am certain that taking those years to refine my direction of study and develop academic-adjacent skills was key to my securing it. I remain eager to pay it forward and participate in initiatives which make funding processes as transparent and accessible as possible; in my previous role at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), for example, I created an Application Library to better support members who might be new to the Society’s funding opportunities.
I had a slightly unusual doctoral journey, in that I switched from full-time to part-time study halfway through; one consequence of this was that while my overall funding amount remained the same, it was paid on a pro-rated basis. During this time, I juggled part-time work as a graduate teaching assistant and as a conference organiser at the London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre alongside the latter stages of my doctorate. The demanding schedule this entailed meant that it was sometimes difficult to feel a sense of belonging within the doctoral cohort. However, the broader skills I gained as a result of this varied workload, and the fascinating people I met through working in different environments, were two meaningful advantages which have helped me to better understand what belonging might mean in higher education spaces more generally.
The experience of juggling multiple roles was to come in handy again after completing my PhD, when I found myself completing a fixed-term academic contract two weeks into the COVID-19 lockdown. While I was extremely fortunate to secure a six-month postdoctoral fellowship during this very unstable period, it coincided with a period of personal loss which monumentally changed my relationship with work. Recalibrating my work-life balance led to pursuing other roles within higher education, and I subsequently worked as the Conferences and Events Manager in SRHE for over two years prior to taking up my current role at UCL Public Policy.
Leaving full-time academic work has nonetheless been a fraught process. Sometimes I have felt a sense of failure rather than of evolution; that part of my identity has been altered or lost, even as I continue to research and publish on an independent basis. It is well established that the imposter phenomenon pervades academia, and is felt the most acutely by those least well represented within higher education. However, gently prising my personal identity away from my work has been enormously positive for my overall wellbeing, and has allowed me the mental space to be more creative in professional settings. So many people do not have the privileges of education and opportunity which I have enjoyed, and as is well known, everyone outside of an elite minority is struggling to cope with current socio-material conditions. Critically analysing structural and systemic inequalities remains a strong motivating factor in my work, and my new role at UCL Public Policy is an excellent setting for this: our team works to support engagement between academic researchers and public policy professionals, for the public good.
Alongside these developments, the most beneficial shift I have made over the course of my career has been rejecting the atomisation that accompanies individuated achievement in favour of the joy, power, and enrichment of working with a collective. In 2018, I became part of the Beyond Gender research collective and this continuously evolving group has been a constant and a bedrock in the face of all manner of difficult circumstances. If I had one piece of advice to share, it would be to find a community that shares your values and works together for a collective purpose. Even during periods when I have felt stilted or demotivated in my work, Beyond Gender has been a consistent source of new ideas, new material, and solidarity. In that spirit, I am very happy to be contacted if you would find it helpful to talk through anything that resonates with you from my career path so far. I wish you well finding your way through the world of work!
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