First-Gen Geoscience Community Blog
Mr Robinson, my high school PE teacher, was the first person to tell me that I should go to university. I was 12, and I had no idea about how university worked. No one in my family had ever been, or even come close to it. Very few people that I knew from my home-town had ever even been to university.
I’m from a town called Skelmersdale in West Lancashire, a pretty deprived area not far from Liverpool, that offers very little in terms of opportunities (or at least the opportunities that I now know are out there). I was one of the smartest kids in our school and Mr Robinson told me that I had what it takes to go to university, like his son who was studying at the University of St Andrews at the time. That put the idea in my head.
Despite being from a poor area I was lucky enough to be in the catchment area for a very good college, the type of place you could describe as an “Oxbridge factory”. There was an expectation that Winstanley College students went to university, so it was there that I learnt how it all worked. We had talks from ex-pupils who had gone to places all over the country to expand their horizons. I was coached on how to write my UCAS statement and how to get through admission interviews. I got to visit the colleges of Oxford in order to prepare me for university life. And it was by another stroke of luck that I came upon the subject of geology. My college was one of the few places in the country that offered it as an A-Level course, and so that was where I fell in love with it.
It was these three things coming together that helped me get into university and have since allowed me to pursue my curiosity about the Earth, something that has taken me around the globe. I had someone who believed in me and told me what was possible. Despite humble beginnings I was privileged enough to learn valuable lessons about how the system worked. And I was fortunate enough to be in the right place that allowed me to find my passion. All things I took for granted at the time but understand the value of now. It’s one of the reasons why I believe so strongly in the merit of outreach activities such as The Brilliant Club, Skype a Scientist, Letters to a Pre-Scientist, all things that tell school children, often would-be first-gen students, about the university experience. Because otherwise they wouldn’t know about it, and they wouldn’t go. Just like how I didn’t know about it until Mr Robinson told me about it. And guess where it was that I graduated from 10 years after that conversation…
Dr Stacy Phillips, Visiting Fellow at the Open University, UK (@Shtacy_Phillips on Twitter, @ShtacyP on Insta)