Spotlight on Brett Kershaw

What is your role and what does it involve?

I have recently relocated from London to Doha to take up the position of Marketing Officer for UCL Qatar. We now have 13 members of staff at the new campus here, and it's an incredibly busy time for all of us as we work hard to get our operations up and running. We will be offering postgraduate programmes in the areas of archaeology, conservation, cultural heritage and museum studies from September 2012.

My role is broad, with a number of responsibilities. First and foremost, it's up to me to ensure that we will have some students next year!

I am currently planning and conducting a wide range of student recruitment activities, both domestic and international. Because we are new, and there isn't a huge amount of awareness about our campus yet, it will be up to me to raise our profile and for this, I will be responsible for generating media coverage, press releases and PR.

I am the first point of contact for potential students and will be responsible for handling the admissions process at the Qatar end. For this, I will work closely with colleagues in the Central Admissions Office in London and with our academic staff in Qatar.

I'm responsible for coordinating our events. We recently had our first - a UCL Alumni Reception. There are actually quite a lot of UCL graduates living in Qatar, not only Qatari nationals but also students from a whole range of countries. Having the opportunity to network with them and hear about their experiences at UCL was fantastic.

Our website recently launched; it is now up to me to develop it further and carry out all future updates. This is something I am looking forward to.

Then there are our marketing materials, printed literature, course booklets, merchandise…the list goes on! I'm very busy, but that's the way I like it.

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I joined UCL in October 2008, so I have recently passed the three-year mark. Most of my time has been spent in the wonderful Faculty of Laws. Before being offered the role in Qatar, I was Admissions Officer for the undergraduate Laws degree programmes.

I was a first point of contact for prospective undergraduate students. I'm very aware that first impressions are so important and it was always my goal to make sure that the service that every single candidate received was better than the service they received from our competitors. I hope it was!

I made decisions on a number of UCAS applications and processed the decisions. I also coordinated our interview and open days. I particularly enjoyed these, as you get to know the candidates very well on paper, so it's great to be able to put faces to the names. Interview days in the Faculty of Laws are always fun and exciting.

I also had a short stint in the International Office prior to my relocation to Qatar. It was a fantastic team to be a part of and I learnt an awful lot in my time there.

I made the decision to move down to London in 2008 as it was somewhere that I'd always wanted to experience living in. I was up in Liverpool at the time and worked in the University of Liverpool's International Office. That gave me my first exposure to higher education administration and I'm glad that it helped me to get to where I am today.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

It's hard to pick out one particular moment, but being given the opportunity to come to Qatar is in itself something that I am really proud of. We are a small team, and starting up the campus here is going to be a huge challenge for all of us. But I am very excited to see what we can achieve.

It's going to be a learning curve for me, no doubt, but the demanding nature of the role is a big part of its appeal.

Before I left London, I had the opportunity to accompany a colleague from the International Office on a student recruitment and profile raising trip to the United States. Getting through that made me proud!

In the space of eight days we visited 15 schools and universities, gave presentations at each one of them, had a number of meetings with various organisations, attended a UCL alumni reception and represented UCL at two huge recruitment exhibitions.

I don't think everyone necessarily appreciates how intense those trips are. The schedule on this particular trip was so gruelling; it certainly gave me a lot of respect for the work that they do and made me appreciate that activities such as these are so crucial to ensuring that we continue to attract the brightest students from across the globe. 

When I worked in Laws admissions, it was great seeing the new group of freshers arrive each September after having helped many of them through the UCAS admissions cycle. It was always good to see the year's hard work come to fruition and to know that in some way I had contributed to their decision to accept UCL's offer.

What is your life like outside UCL?

Now that I've left south-east London behind for Qatar, it's certainly different from before. I'm spending my evenings and weekends getting acquainted with the city and the expat lifestyle.

Typically, I'll be catching up with friends at one of the high-end hotels here in Doha, or going to one of the very extravagant malls. My favourite place here is Souq Waqif, which is a really cool place to smoke some shisha (flavoured tobacco) and watch the world go by.

I'm just trying to meet as many new people as possible, and there are so many interesting people from different backgrounds here. You can really feel that it is a city that's going places.

I'm very into sports. Sadly, these days it's more watching than playing, although I am trying to make an effort to be more active. I make sure I catch my football team, Liverpool, each week, along with my other team, Exeter City.

I love to travel. I'm hoping to see as much of the region as possible while I'm based out here. I've just been to Bahrain for the weekend and loved it. Lebanon and Oman are next on my list, and if it stabilises, then Syria is somewhere that I've heard amazing things about.

If I'm at home, I like nothing more than a good boxset. I am partial to a bit of reality TV and my current addiction is The Only Way Is Essex!