EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH CO-EDITORS:
Dr. Kelly Pickard Smith and Dr. Amy Bonsall DISCUSSING THEIR RECENTLY LAUNCHED BOOK ResearcHER Would you like to tell us a bit about yourselves as people and researchers? Amy: As a founding Co-Director
of the Women in Academia Support Network (WIASN), I am utterly committed and passionate about making sure that absolutely everybody has the opportunity to reach higher education, and to pursue that if it’s something that they want to do. There are so many barriers, particularly to women, that make it something that needs challenging. Women, those who identify as women and non-binary people, need spaces to be able to feel included and be able to talk safely. Kelly: I did my secondary
education in the 80s on a council estate in the North, so you can kind of imagine the quality of education at the time and the societal expectations of people growing up on council estates, the kind of careers that you might go into. I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and I was very guided into: “Are you sure you don’t want to be a secretary? Office worker? Or, work in a shop?” At the same time you had people like Professor Brian Cox with nearly waist-length curly hair going to university to study
Astrophysics. I looked very similar to him at the time with my perm. I was told: “You’re from a council estate, you’re a girl, that career is not for you.” I then ended up doing a Masters and then a PhD, which questioned why heavily mathematical careers like Science, Technology, Engineering etcetera were deemed as being only for certain kinds of people, and why we
32 | EDUCATION CHOICES MAGAZINE | AU T U M N 2 02 2
believe that it is for the uppermiddle class genius types, and that they are the only people interested in these when I also was, but didn’t quite get there. I am now co-founding this research support network with Amy, so that we can support anybody who wants to do any kind of research, helping them to work towards those goals. Pegging certain types of people to ‘stay in their
