UCL Connect: Life After Work – How to Make the Most of Your Retirement or Semi Retirement

Join fellow UCL graduates for an afternoon of insight, shared experience, and community. Our panel of alumni speakers will explore what it really means to move beyond full‑time work: how to redefine purpose, stay connected, and pursue long‑delayed ambitions.

Following the panel, guests will have the chance to continue the discussion over lunch, meet others navigating similar transitions, and reconnect with the UCL community.

There will also be an optional student-led tour of UCL’s Gower Street campus after the event. 

What to expect

Panel discussion: 12pm - 1pm

A moderated conversation with UCL alumni who have taken diverse paths into retirement or semi‑retirement. They’ll share personal reflections, practical advice, and the lessons they wish they’d known earlier.

Lunch and conversation: 1pm – 2:30pm

Enjoy refreshments while connecting with fellow alumni, exchanging ideas, and building new networks.

(optional) Campus tour: 2:30pm–3:30pm

Rediscover UCL through the eyes of today’s students and explore the newly renovated campus, refreshed as part of the UCL200 birthday celebrations. Please note: the campus tour will follow on from the lunch. There will be sufficient spaces for all guests and there is no need to book separately.

Who Can Attend

This event is open to all UCL alumni, and you are very welcome to bring a guest. If you plan to attend with someone, please register your guest when booking so we can ensure accurate numbers for catering and planning.

Meet the panelists 

Paul Higgs (chair)

Professor of the Sociology of Ageing, UCL Division of Psychiatry

Paul Higgs is Professor of the Sociology of Ageing in the UCL Division of Psychiatry. He has researched many aspects of the changing nature of later life including social divisions, dementia and personhood, consumption and technology, and ageism. Professor Higgs edits the journal ‘Social Theory and Health’ and has published widely in social gerontology and medical sociology and is the author of ‘Cultures of ageing: Self, citizen and the body’ and ‘Rethinking the Sociology of Ageing: Towards a Sociology of Later Life ‘. He is a Fellow of both the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the Gerontological Society of America and was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Society of Gerontology in 2021.

Tanya Chakravarti

UCL BSc Psychology 1977

After graduating UCL, an interest in Social and Occupational psychology, together with vacation work in a personnel department, led me to apply for graduate training schemes in Personnel – now called HR or People. I joined the BBC’s first ever personnel training scheme and stayed for 28 years, working my way up from Trainee to an HR Director. As an HR Director I delivered strategic business objectives including launching new digital services, improving diversity, and co-leading complex organisational change. I then took the opportunity of early retirement to train as an Executive Coach and have since been self-employed, coaching clients part-time in a wide range of sectors including industry, government, charity, NHS and academia. It was great “coming back” many years later to coach some highly talented women on the Women in Leadership programme at UCL, making use of some psychology driven insights.

A keen alumna, I attended UCL Alumni London Group events for over 20 years until it was wound up 3 years ago. Sensing a gap, I volunteered to set up an informal self-managed WhatsApp group so that alumni could stay in touch, as well as organise cultural and social events such as London walks, art gallery tours and an annual formal festive lunch. I have contributed to other UCL initiatives including on employability beyond academia in the sciences, and as an interviewee for the book Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital, recently launched as part of UCL200 celebrations. I have gradually been stepping back from paid work to enjoy even more social, cultural, volunteering, wildlife and wellbeing activities and I am delighted to share experiences on preparing for, and getting the most out of, semi-retirement/retirement.

Dr Margaret Mountford

UCL BA Ancient World Studies 1999, MA Classics 1994, PhD Papyrology 2012

Dr Margaret Mountford was born in Holywood, Northern Ireland and educated at Strathearn School, Belfast and Girton College, Cambridge. After 25 years as a corporate finance lawyer in the City of London, she came to UCL in 1999, to study Ancient World Studies and Classics, and in 2012 completed a PhD in Papyrology, based on documentary papyri from the Roman and Byzantine periods, written in Greek but found in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. 

She has held a number of non-executive directorships and currently chairs a group of private companies operating in the food sector. In 2016 she chaired the panel of judges of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has been Chair of Governors of three Inner London state secondary schools, was Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society from 2016 to 2019 and since June 2024 has been President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. 

A mediocre golfer with a passion for armchair sport, she lives in London and is regularly surprised by the number of people who still recognise her from her role in the early series of Alan Sugar’s Apprentice programme. 

Huw Williams

UCL History BA 1972

Since graduating in History at UCL in 1972, I spent most of that ensuing decade in London pursuing research at the LSE and working for the then Board of Celtic Studies, University of Wales. I gradually emerged into adult education and taught for twenty-five years full-time at a southwest Wales FE college near Swansea, as well as part-time work for Cardiff and Swansea Universities, Workers Educational Association (WEA), and as a guest lecturer for several local and national bodies. This is where I am now, in semi-retirement, busier than ever presenting all manner of History classes to daytime and evening gatherings, drawing all the time on my days of study at UCL. FUN it certainly is!