Unconventional path into academia... isn't everyone's?
My understanding of academic life is shaped by how I entered it.
I came into university later in life as a first-generation student, completing my undergraduate degree in my 30s and my PhD in my 40s.
This journey gave me a direct, practical understanding of what it means to step into research spaces without the cultural familiarity, language, or unspoken rules that others take for granted. Academia can easily feel like an unfamiliar world with its own hidden conventions, where articulating confusion or asking questions feels dangerous for fear of looking less competent.
In my practice, I don’t assume a single academic pathway or a standard way of “being” a researcher. Instead, this space is explicitly created to acknowledge how your background, life experience, and outside responsibilities interact with your research process.
You don’t need to explain or justify how you arrived here. The point is simply to take your experience of research seriously, entirely on its own terms.
If you would like to get a deeper understanding into my thoughts on how my background shaped my experience, feel free to have a look at my reflective blog articles or my LinkedIn page.
How we will work together
Our conversations are guided entirely by what feels most important to you. Instead of focusing on institutional outputs, milestones, or performance metrics, our emphasis is on understanding how you are actually living and experiencing research as an immersed process over time.
We work by exploring the areas that feel difficult to hold on your own—the uncertainties, recurring pressures, and decisions that intersect with your everyday life beyond the desk.
There is no requirement to arrive with clearly defined problems or a polished update. The role of this space is not to judge your progress or direct your choices, but to support careful thinking and sense-making. It is simply a place where your research journey itself can be voiced without needing to be measured or corrected.
A reflective space for your research journey
Complementing your existing support
Your research journey relies on a wide network of support or “villages”, from academic and professional services support to peer networks, friends and family. (Rainford, 2023).
Within this broader landscape, supervision remains the consistent, central pillar, providing subject-specific guidance, academic oversight, and formal responsibility for decisions about your project itself.
Our work together serves a different purpose. It offers a space where you are not being evaluated or measured, and where the broader experience of doing research can be explored—including questions, uncertainties, and pressures that may not easily find room within supervisory or institutional settings.
This independent framing supports you to navigate existing structures and expectations with greater clarity and confidence, drawing entirely on your own priorities, values, and understanding.
Boundaries and scope
Reflective Mentoring is about focussing on how you are experiencing and living your research, and on making sense of that process over time. As such, this is not therapy and cannot replace clinical or mental health support. While I am also a qualified person-centred therapist, I choose to keep these practices entirely separate to protect the distinct focus of each space.
Mentoring centers on how you relate to, and within, the academic endeavour or a research project, whereas therapy opens up an intrapersonal exploration of how you relate to the world and others. Conflating the two would distort these unique purposes, blurring your focus and creating an unsettling confusion between the structured, time-bound demands of your research journey and the unhurried exploration of your internal world.
Which form of support feels most appropriate for your circumstances is something we can discuss openly during our initial consultation. The priority is simply for us to have absolute clarity about what this space can—and cannot—offer, allowing you to make decisions that best support your own needs.
Contact Me
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Nuneaton, UK
Mon-Fri: 9 AM – 6 PMSaturday: 9 AM – 4 PMSunday: Closed