Dr Sweta Rajan-Rankin

Really interesting question. My mother is a Professor in education and I am from India originally and I suppose she was a real role model for me, and she continues to be a role model for a number of young people she teaches. The one question she asked me, when I was about 16 I think, was really life defining. She asked me not what I wanted to do or be in the world, but how I wanted to serve. My friends’ parents were asking them what they wanted to do, jobs they wanted to work in, the occupations they wanted to pursue, but the question about service was really important. What difference did I want to make to the world rather than my entitlement to have this kind of wonderful career, and so that was a real turning point for me.

I then became a Medical Psychiatric Social Worker. I trained in Mumbai but one of the things that was really inspirational for me was my mother. She was a working professional and I had always been surrounded by these really strong powerful female role models. There was a sense that if you work hard then anything is possible and eventually everything was possible. I won a scholarship to a place to do my Masters at Oxford University and stayed there to finish my doctoral studies as well. I think if there had been a sense early on that things weren’t possible, I suppose I wouldn’t have aspired, so having really strong women in my life is, I guess, the reason that I am here.

I am a huge believer of postgraduate education and continuing education, I suppose lifelong education even. In social work, we often get mature students and they return to studies even after taking career breaks. Sometimes we have students who have raised their families and now it’s time for them to explore their careers. I do think that there is no limit in terms of age or life circumstances, if you are focused and dedicated and you have the structural opportunities to allow you pursue education. The most striking thing for me in terms of higher education undoubtedly is the fact that it helps you to think for yourself, to become a critical thinker, to find your own voice and figure out what values and issues matter to you. I’ve studied for a very long time, but I think when I was doing my undergraduate it helped me to learn, but it was only my postgraduate education that I felt I learnt to think for myself and to have, as I said, my own voice in terms of certain issues.

Right so, very long story. So I’ve done a whole bunch of different degrees, I did a Psychology degree when I was doing my undergraduate course and I did that in Delhi, back in India. I think everybody who is about 17 or 18 wants to do psychology, because you want to understand how things work and to learn about ourselves and society. I was very fortunate to study in the premiere institutes in India, I think that was very important in my earlier development. It also helps to recognise that institutions are extraordinarily competitive, it’s very much merit based and children are forced to study at the expense of everything else so education was hugely emphasised. But when I did my masters in Social Policy and a PhD after that at Oxford University it was a brilliant experience, I don’t think I could have had that experience anywhere else.

Largely this was because of the really diverse student body, which sounds strange that Oxford would be so diverse, but it is because it has such a large pool of international students. While you are taught in particular groups, you come across people who are from many different countries, many different backgrounds, and I suppose I learned more from my colleagues and peers than I did from the professors. So I definitely think my experience at Oxford was wonderful and I am still extremely good friends with a lot of the people I studied with. It’s not surprising that we have all taken up leadership positions in different parts of the world. Not all of us ended up in academia, some of my friends work in the charity sector, others have gone into politics, and others are entrepreneurs with their own businesses. So that’s important too, it’s not a factory churning out the same successful person, but there’s different spaces that you can occupy.

After I finished my PhD I was like many other young people, who receive their doctorate and feel they have finally arrived and got the highest academic certificate they can, but it’s really difficult getting a job and I think it’s getting even more competitive now. I was very fortunate that in 2009 I submitted my PhD and got a job straight away, and that’s not something that happens anymore really, but I got my first lectureship at a London University. It was a real eye opener to go from Oxbridge to a London University because of the very large work load and quite a different student body. People don’t tell you that when you start your career, they don’t tell you that having a PhD doesn’t prepare you so much for life, because you have to then learn how to teach and need to try explaining these complex matters. I loved teaching as it was such a good learning experience for me, for my job. The professional experience of being an academic in London was extremely competitive but also very insecure and in large ways it was insecure because of restructuring, closing down courses etc.

During my first post was when I had my children, so I had two career breaks to have my kids, and while I was pregnant with my second child that was the point they closed down the program I was working on. I had a child on the way, and there was a lot of job insecurity with organisational restructuring and redundancies. I would emphasise in particular to anyone going through these challenges the importance of being hopeful and resilient and really recognising your work even though you might be in a circumstance where you can’t see your own value when you work. I was nine months pregnant and I went on the job market, something you don’t see much and I remember thinking to myself ‘who’s going to employ me?’ because I couldn’t start immediately, but I was so thrilled when I actually got two senior lectureship jobs at really good universities. One was in Ireland and one was in the University of Kent and that was a huge eye opener for me because I realised that I had value and that was reassuring. It was a very simple thing, I came for an interview and fell in love with the University of Kent - it has this wonderful warm inviting vibe. Colleagues I met were genuine and interested in what I was saying, and the interview was marvellous, I almost didn’t want it to end because we talked about so much. I feel like this was different, Kent is well known, we have a very high research ranking and there are some phenomenal scholars, so it was wonderful to think I was joining a community of people I admire, because some people I would have read their textbooks during my degree.

I think again it would be my family. When I went on the job market when I was pregnant, that meant I was writing and interviewing and publishing while my daughter was just weeks old, which would not have possible without my husband and my sister and mother. My sister and mother both live in India and they came to live with me and supported me, proof readng my work. They literally said to me "you know, your dreams are our dreams and by you succeeding we succeed", and there was nothing like it, I was so grateful to have that.

I described my first job to you, which was a really big learning curve for me. You learn to teach and navigate the politics and make a space for yourself. The University of Kent has this quite wonderful and trusting research culture and they let you get on with it. They employ self-motivated people, then they trust you to teach to a high standard and trust you to research. That level of trust and commitment allows staff to relax and enjoy what they do and to innovate and be creative. I do think cultures where you are surveyed and controlled are work cultures where people work out of anxiety and fear, and that is not a good working culture. Whereas the university has a really good kind of feel for research and working culture which makes you feel like you can thrive, and makes you work harder and challenge yourself, so that has been wonderful actually.

What do I value most about teaching students? I absolutely adore teaching. I think teaching is transformative, it transforms the person who is teaching and the one who is being taught. For me it’s that ‘ah ha’ moment. In a lecture, the students aren’t only engaging in what you are saying but you have all achieved a different energy when you are connecting. When an idea you are talking about makes sense and changes their perception on a social issue. There’s nothing better than that- I have a very interactive style of teaching. I like to use a whole range of different teaching methods, I use humour too as it relates to people and use everyday examples to help them connect. I’m also really interested in pushing students to think for themselves and differently and not to take for granted the assumption as the whole truth. I know when teaching as well, when you have done it for a long time, you know when you have a great teaching session, when you feel enlightened by it and the students seem to change the environment in that it feels that learning has been achieved. I guess learning is a two-way process, you cannot teach someone by speaking at them, they need to be engaged, and most importantly it needs to touch them emotionally and needs to be safe. The topics in my program can be quite powerful and personal material so it is about creating a safe space to explore the topics. I love teaching, it’s wonderful.

I love it and I think it is the deal breaker of universities. I don’t think I would choose to work in a university that was so heavily teaching oriented that did not allow scholars to do research. Research, for me, is a puzzle. You want to unveil and unpack, to come to grips with the problem you explore. It is exhilarating, but it is also sometimes lonely because you don’t quite know what you are doing or if you get there. There are challenges in terms of achieving your outputs and being relevant in terms of metrics like REF, but for me research is a way of connecting theory and practice, connecting your own creative potential with social problems and I just adore it. The fact Kent allows you to succeed using teaching and research and scholarship, it values it all equally, and that is very special.

It might possibly be my interview when I came to the University of Kent. I was so sleep deprived; my baby was 3 weeks old so you can imagine I was not really with it. I remember meeting the colleagues and they were so friendly and it was then that I felt I was speaking to people that understand me and what I wanted to do. So whereas it was meant to be maybe a scary encounter, it wasn’t, it was wonderful. I was sorry to see the interview end actually as I had so much to still say and learn. It was special to come to a work place and feel like you’d come home.

I think time is always an issue. I have a young family, my son is going to be 6 and my daughter is 3 now, but when I came to Kent she was just 7 months old. There was a period of time when my husband was commuting from London so I was pretty much a single parent and working with very young kids, that was very hard. I do live in Canterbury and there’s a really nice feeling of a campus town and I think that’s wonderful that your colleagues live nearby. I think the main challenges I suppose was trying to evaluate how it is possible to be successful on a research contract without compromising your health and wellbeing and your work-life balance. In this regard Kent is pretty good with the trusting component. There is a lot of pressure, I won’t say that there is not, certainly on a research contract as you are expected to publish and get grant money. I dealt with these sort of pressures by diving head first into these pressures and the culture of the school. So what I found really wonderful was taking on research roles. At present I have two quite important research roles at the school level, not just at the team level. I am the Deputy Director of Research at Medway with a lead role for public engagement. I am also the Director for the Migration Ethnicity Race and Belonging cluster. So it sounds counter-intuitive but I do think when you invest in research culture you do get so much back. You find you’re in a community of people who have like-minded interests, it is energising to feel that you want to be part of and also aware of the privilege of being on a research contract with protected time to do research. I know many colleagues who don’t have this and don’t have the time to do that. It is challenging but the key thing is finding the balance. In a sense it’s like saying everything is important and there is only so many hours in a day so how are you going to achieve it all? So the key thing there is to just remember and recognise that your core priorities had to change from thinking of yourself as an individual in my career to thinking of myself as having responsibilities to my team and students. Putting the teaching aspect front and centre because they depend on me to deliver, and also important for me was a lot of loving kindness in the self-care world. I don’t work weekends and I don’t do evenings if I can help it. Often it means my week is very long and intense but then I protect family and personal time which is important because otherwise you feel like you will burnout so you need to find your balance which doesn’t come easily. It doesn’t stay put either because what works for you at one point may not work for another, so being flexible to demands but to have boundaries on how much more to give up for work.

Survival! I think sometimes it feels like that because it is hard to feel you have achieved something because the purpose of life for me is not to have arrived but to seek and keep searching. I think in terms of achievements I would say that I am unafraid and I try and apply for things despite fear of rejection, because most things I have got, I get them and realise that it wasn’t actually that scary, so I guess that is my advice to people. Don’t be afraid, put yourself forward, everyone fears they are not good enough, you would be surprised at how good you are so put yourself forward and try. I am proud of the fact that I have achieved leadership positions. I work hard on engaging people, so I guess one single thing if you ask me to highlight that I would say, I am absolutely committed to supporting early career researchers at that stage of their career where they don’t have established networks. That’s something I am hugely passionate about so I would in my own time read early career researcher’s abstracts and articles and provide feedback. If I run events I identify people that seem promising and invite them to take part in it. I’m very keen on public engagement and involving non-academic public to be part of events, so I guess I feel like my time is so precious that I can’t contribute to the creation of inclusion cultures. What I would say is, when I was significantly early on in my career, there were people who believed in me who would send me opportunities, who would encourage me and read my drafts and I’ve been able to get to where I am now. So I think it is really important to give back as much as you can. So yeah in terms of achievements I don’t think it’s about specific things but it’s the mind set of how I work, which is about inclusivity and take people along with you, don’t leave them behind. It’s about cooperation rather than competition.

At present I have just finished a research project. I was very fortunate in that, when I first joined Kent in 2016, I basically applied for a bunch of things that I was very lucky to get. I applied for an internal grant and I was lucky to get it and I finished the project. It was a sensory ethnography of hair salons in Kent and London, it looked at black people’s hair and how it matters for their identity. I am in the process of writing up a number of papers from it and I think going forward, the main thing for me, I’m quite happy with what I have been able to achieve these last three years. I am still early in my career but I am coming to the point where I probably won’t be, so I am pleased to have achieved a senior lectureship position. My research profile is really coming together but what I really think I should be doing, going forward, is applying for research funding, that’s the big hurdle and it is very competitive. I would really like to do a couple external projects, working with others from universities. The key topics I would like to develop further are body studies, so I work on body work and also on ageing, so there’s a lot of interesting work I’d like to do on transnational ageing that will be exciting as well. But it would be about getting these links further, getting some funding, and in the next couple of years depending on how things go I will probably apply for leadership which is the next level in career progression. But having said that, I think it is important to enjoy where you are as well. This was a real learning curve for me, it’s not always about the rat race and running to achieve something more. Sometimes the best times of your career are the ones you’re in, like that great moment a student tells you that you’ve made a great moment in their lives or when your research clicks and something really starts to make sense. I had a really wonderful experience where a student I taught in 2009, this would have been the first cohort of students I would have ever taught, she contacted me to tell me she is senior practicing social worker and she is supervising my current batch of students, and there’s something amazing about that because they are now paying it forward and I had a role in that.

I think Kent is unique. It is well situated in that we are highly regarded but we do not have the pleasure of Russell Group so we are just under the radar in terms of that. It allows us to have quite a lot of flexibility and achieve the same, if not better research than some Russell Groups. I am concerned with the shift towards neoliberal education, the fact that our students are becoming consumers, that fees put large financial pressure on people so they become excluded from higher education. It is worrying. I am extremely distressed by the possibility of Brexit and what that means in terms of closing our borders. I am also quite distressed with the hostile environmental policy which we are beginning to see in the UK. It isn’t just a matter of leaving the EU but the message we are giving the rest of the world about whether international students are welcome. Kent can do a lot to buffer us from those challenges, however it needs to stand tall and resist the external pressures rather than to buy into it. It is very simple though, universities that invest and believe in their staff and students are safe hands to believe and trust in, so Kent needs to remain committed to staff and students. Then we will be ok, but if it becomes a business then there is much to worry about.

I think to be in higher education you need certain skills, and it is not just about your qualifications of research degrees, but you need a resilient mind set and thick skin. Being in the academy you have to get used to failure quickly so you need to be tough to address these concerns. What motivates me in this job is that there is no other job in the world where you change people’s lives every day, and I feel like I do that in social work. It’s that coming together of teaching and research, to make a difference, to fight for a more just world, that what you do is meaningful- this is what gets me out of bed.

Don’t give up! You are stronger than you think you are, there will be challenges that come your way. Believe in yourself and surround yourself with people that believe in you and be open to learning, do not be afraid of failure. Success comes to people who are open and who are keen on learning. Success isn’t about a single moment where you have arrived, it is a long process so learn from your mistakes, be open, be kind to others and it will be paid back to you. In terms of surviving the university, because being on a course is challenging, they might or not get a job straight away, it’s not easy being a student right now. I think that’s my main message, believe in your voice. Engage in an ethical value based career, do what you love and not what you think you should do in terms of successful career, just follow your passion.