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Read bout PhD student in Mathematics, Eleanor's involvement in Widening Participation programmes.
What is your role and how long have you been at UCL?
I’m a PhD student in Mathematics and the Centre for Nerve Engineering. I did my undergraduate in Maths at UCL so in total I’ve been at UCL coming up to 7 years.
Why did you get involved with WP?
I’m a neurodivergent, mixed ethnicity female who was always interested in STEM so growing up I attended and benefited from a range of different WP schemes. Looking back, I still have fond memories of the people who participated in those events and would answer my questions, no matter how much of a tangent or how little they may have made sense! Being given those chances to look beyond the school curriculum with likeminded students gave me the confidence to really thrive at university. So, several years later at UCL when I was asked if I wanted the opportunity to be involved with WP, how could I say anything but ‘Yes!’.
What did you get out of it?
Firstly, I enjoy it. There’s nothing like it – I can be having a terrible week where everything that can go wrong, does. Then the WP event I agreed to do a couple of months ago comes along and I wonder – ‘Why do I do this? Don’t I have enough on my plate with agreeing to do more?’. But by spending those couple of hours talking to students who are just at the beginning of their journey it really reminds me why I chose to study. So when the event is over and I go back to my desk to work on my own research, whatever problem I had never seems as bad.
Additionally, I started off as a terrible public speaker. I’m dyslexic so I tend to speak words in the wrong order or say the opposite of what I mean. For example, left and right is still a real problem! The idea of speaking in conferences or interviews really terrified me but by being involved in WP events it’s allowed me to practice public speaking and answering questions on the fly, so presenting at conferences seems far less terrifying!
What were you nervous about before doing it?
I was worried that I didn’t know enough. It always felt like I was playing at being an expert and there really should be someone else doing what I was doing. The first couple of times I did WP events I was positive someone would point out that I was talking nonsense. But after a while I realised that that just wasn’t going to happen because I did know what I was doing!
When doing mathematics WP events there’s usually some kind of maths problem given to the students. I always worried I would get it wrong. Even if I had done the same problem several times before and I had the solutions to study, I worried that maybe I just wasn’t clever enough to understand the question. It’s imposter symptom in its fullest and something that I have every time before an event.
Highlight moment
I’ve been a mentor on the Year 12 Research Summer School run by the Mathematics Department for the last couple of years. It’s a course where PhD students go out to a school to mentor a group of five Year 12 students on a mathematical research project. My project is an interdisciplinary project using mathematical modelling to look at the crossover between electrical circuits and the cardiovascular system. It’s on a model that I only learnt about at the start of my PhD so when the students start the project, they haven’t ever seen anything like it. In the final session the mentors take a step back and the students present what they’ve learnt during the project to the other schools involved in the scheme. I always find myself tearing up in my student’s presentations. The students always put so much work into this project. They capably explain complex ideas that I’ve included in the project as a tangent or background. It shouldn’t, but it always takes me by surprise how much they absorb from the project and it makes the work I’ve put into it worthwhile.