Transcript of podcast episode with mentor, Nick Duncan.
Cate: Welcome everyone to another episode of Career Talk. My name is Cate Linforth, I’m going to be your host today, and I am excited because this episode is all about mentoring. We are very lucky, because we have today on our podcast, Nick Duncan, who is one of the mentors on the University of Birmingham mentoring scheme. Welcome Nick, thank you for joining us.
Nick: Well, thanks, Cate really appreciate it. Really happy to talk to everybody about mentoring and how it can be successful for people.
Cate: I think it's really nice because mentoring is one of those things, and I think we'll probably get into this in a bit more depth further on in the podcast, but mentoring is definitely one of those things where there's a little bit of trepidation around it. Students and professionals alike, I think, unless you've experienced mentoring or you really know what you're getting into, it can be a little bit daunting to sign up to have a mentor or even to sign up to be a mentor, I think sometimes.
Nick: It's great, I mean I definitely agree. Unfortunately, a lot of people have never experienced mentoring in some form or other. It's only when you do, and you have a mentor that really helps guide you, that you start to see the real relevance of it and the successes and things. Before I go a little further, I guess, I ought to talk a little bit about myself, so the audience knows who I am.
I graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1981 with a degree in Geological Sciences, as it was called then, a long time ago. I was very fortunate because at the time, there was a great demand for geologists overseas, and one of the reasons why I did geology was, hopefully, I could travel. And it enabled me to travel and in fact, in the September of the year, I graduated I was living in Australia working as a geologist. As my mother said you couldn't have gone any further away. It was in 1981, it was quite a shock. It was great fun and I’m grateful for the having done the Geology degree and it sent me off on a great path. I’ll probably talk a little later about the roles that I have had and so on, but I think I’m a good example of starting a career in one area and then sort of moving forwards into different sectors and ending up with a completely different job title, and not really having planned it either, but again just making use of opportunities.
I’ll tell you a little bit about that, but also, I’ve actually been retired about four and a half years now. I still do a bit of consulting, but what really takes up most of my time is, I am on the board of a non-profit called the Island Foundation which is based in Singapore, but educates children in a small island in Indonesia called Bintan and we have various learning centres, I think 11 at last count, and we help educate the young kids up to about the age of 11 or 12. We teach them English and various things. Our programme is called learning for sustainability. We teach them a lot about sustainability and how to look after the ocean and things like that, because all the villages are located on the coast. I help a lot with the operations of that, although I’m on the board, we're a fairly small organisation so I get involved with a bit on the financial side and various other things. That takes up quite a bit of my time and the rest of it I just travel around and enjoy things.
Cate: That sounds amazing! It sounds like from university and the start of your career you had that aspiration to travel. I think it's really important, and you touched on this as well, for students to know that what they study and what they initially go into as a career path isn't necessarily what they're going to be doing in 5, 10, 20 years time. So many people go into university thinking, ‘I will study this degree, and this will set me off on this career path’. But what's really important for us in careers, but for lots of people to make sure that students know is that it's okay to change your mind, you can change your mind either when you're studying, you can change your mind after you study. It’s never going to be a devastating circumstance to change your mind, there are always opportunities that can arise and sometimes it's okay to take a sidestep. Just because you start on one path, doesn't mean that has to be the clear direction, you can take a side road. You seem to be a shining example of that, which is really nice.
So, pre-retirement, can you tell me a little bit about what your most recent role was before you retired and what you ended up doing?
Nick: Sure yeah, probably the one organisation that I worked for a length of time was a company called IHS, which ironically doesn't exist anymore. When I left it merged with a major financial information company called Market and became called IHS Market and then, about a year ago it was bought by S&P, Global, a huge information business company. The background behind it, it's what we call business information. IHS actually stands for information handling services, when it used to do many, many years ago. What we do is we provide information for industries to understand what's going on that's relevant to them, and hopefully help them be more successful.
The way I got into it was when I finished my career in the field as a geologist, I was looking around for things to do that meant I could be at home a little bit more, because I had just got married and it seemed like a good idea. I actually got a job writing about activities and what was going on in the oil and gas industry and, in Northeast Asia. That got me into understanding about what was happening, how to write for an audience and basically a research role. I was constantly looking for information, calling people, finding out what was happening, and then we would sell the reports on a on a subscription basis to oil and gas companies that wanted to know what was happening. That was great fun and then I was actually in Asia at the time, I was living in Singapore then, where I am right now but, but after about a year with the company in Singapore I got moved back to the UK, which was a bit of a surprise. I worked there for a while and then what happened was the small company I was working got bought over by IHS and suddenly my world was tipped upside down and we actually had to merge with a major competitor, which was quite something because we knew each other quite well and we knew we were doing much better than they were in a lot of areas, and they had a certain degree of resentment. So, I was fortunate to do that.
Then at that time I started to get opportunities in my career to move away a little from the geology and writing about what was going on. This was around the late 1990s and just as computerisation was coming on, the Internet was really getting going, we supplied information basically in printed form out to companies all around the world. We literally used to courier this around. Then with the Internet, and the opportunity I had was to start to move the companies towards the Internet. We put our information online and it was all database. Fortunately, the company we merged with, they had a really good system, and we were able to capitalise on that. I remember trying to get the companies that we sold to, to look at this data online, instead of just sending one huge bulk of information out every month say to Exxon Mobil in California or wherever they may be, they now had an opportunity for lots of people to get online. It was still very new then, we had a very simple website, and a very easy way to make it work.
It was great because the take up was tremendous. What happened to me was my manager said to me, I think you actually ought to look after all these other products and start to look at putting these online. I was given a several other products in what we would call, as the international data set, because the company had to serve a US on an international set. I sort of inadvertently moved away completely from what I was originally doing research and things, and then started basically doing products. I didn't have any training on what products were really about or how to display them whatever, but I had a lot of experts producing them. So, I spent a bit of time about thinking about what the website should look like, how people could use them which, of course, these days, is now usability programs all sorts of things that people do, but he was very much in its infancy. We were feeling our way but we put more of the products online and we got greater success. We grew our audience as it were, which is great. It was tremendous, it was a great time, really enjoyed it.
Then my boss at the time said to me, ‘we're not really selling a lot of the information that you guys are doing internationally in America, not as well as we should, how would you like to come to America and help us sell me more?’. I was like oh wow well I knew all the people quite well because they knew me as looking after the products. So, yeah I went to live in Texas for seven years and basically started off helping these sales people to understand how to sell the information. Inadvertently without really realising it what was happening was I was moving into a marketing type of role, because what I was doing was how do we market these things, how do we make them work, etc. That was good fun because they really appreciated me being there because I could help them, giving the sales guys information on how to present it, talk about the different products that we had and how they, who they were meant for and so on.
That was pretty good and then a couple of years into my time there things changed the company changed its organisation structure and became regional and they said to me, would you stay in America and not be part of the UK sector anymore, and I said well why not see seemed like a good idea. From then on, I started to get involved in a lot of what we were doing in in both North and South America. At the time the company was becoming very acquisitive. Originally, when I joined we had information for the engineering sector and also for the oil and gas sector. We then started acquiring major businesses, so we got into the maritime sector for information, automotive sector, chemicals, metals and mining, all sorts of different areas, economics and country risk. So, I got involved with the acquisition side and was working quite a lot in Latin America and so was asked to produce a strategic growth document on how we could grow in Latin America with the different parts of the business we had. So, again my role has changed into something different, but it was great fun traveling around and talking to companies and seeing if whether they would be suitable to for us to purchase or whatever, and then getting involved with ones that we did buy.
Yeah, so, I was able to do that and then also at the time they gave me a sales leadership role as well, much to my consternation, because I’m not a sales guy but sales leadership is a little bit different. I helped that in Latin America and had a team down there selling energy information. So, that was all terrific, and then my time in the US was getting to the end of my visa. I requested that perhaps I could go back to Asia and do a similar thing is that be doing your Latin America. Fortunately, the CEO said yeah, why not. He also said a few other things like give me a give me a plan in two days and various other things and frightened me. But we did that and I went to Asia and that sort of set me on the role really that was my last major role in IHS which was leading the marketing team, growing the strategic direction of the business in Asia, and then later on, I also had a sales team to look after as well for the region. So, yeah it’s a long way from where I came.
Cate: But that's great. To me, that's really fascinating because it just shows that you've been really, I don’t know if opportunistic is the right word, but you've when an opportunity arises and it aligns with what you're interested in, in the elements of what your current role was that you were really finding interested in and finding growth opportunities, there wasn't a fear to follow those pathways. I think sometimes it's easy for people to think 'but I’m a geologist, I need to stay on the geologists path’. I’m not saying it doesn't matter what you started as, but it doesn't have to be what you finish as. It's okay to try different things, and I think there's always an opportunity there that if you had gone into the more marketing side of things and didn't like it you already had the skill set to go sideways back into what you were doing. I think sometimes there's that trepidation, that if you start one thing that's you set for life. You're a really great example of following those opportunities and seeing where they arise, when it aligns with with what you're doing and what you like.
Nick: Definitely, I think my original thought when I got with the products, I was trying to sort of work out well what was it that to the customers really wanted. We had created something and we thought it was what they wanted, and we can add a good idea, but of course, when you go and talk to them a little bit more you start to realise what they really want and sometimes it's something quite different. That was really interesting. Then, the next stage really was more into the what we call product marketing and then actual field marketing was how're we actually promoting these and who're we promoting them to, because they were very specific products for very specific audiences. Then latterly with the sales, it was like well how is sales actually talking to the customer, because this is a business to business sales process and the products were very expensive, I mean probably the cheapest was maybe $25,000, the most expensive was multi millions to get access to databases and things. These were major decisions, there wasn't one person, you had to please, there were several that you had to go work with, helping the sales people navigate that and one thing I found was really interesting because I wanted to make sure that, at least at that end they were talking the right talk and we had the best opportunity to sell things.
That's how my career moved because I was interested in what the next bit was. The strategic side was fantastic, I mean I love that because we were a huge growth company and working out how to grow, what was the best way and getting involved in a lot of the acquisitions and researching, spending time with them and working out whether they be suitable or not was a really good bonus, and something that I'd never expected to do. The learning that I have, I mean my company, I was with grew multiple times, I think we probably made 40 acquisitions in about 10 years or something like that or 8 years. We were really, really moving quickly and the idea of the organisation was to be the best we could be in a particular sector. We would acquire other organisations that were doing something similar that we felt could really add to the value that we were doing. It was great being in that position to be able to drive it forwards. But what I learned is obviously there's quite a lot of turmoil in acquiring companies and the way that IHS worked at the time, which was very, very clever was that we were buying adjacent industries. I guess, if you think of automotive and there's a lot of plastics in automotive the way the chemicals are they run on energy and oil and gas, we have an oil and gas on etc, the metals and mining, the steel and on. We had a lot more to offer to these organisations than they originally thought it was it was a very, very clever strategy. We integrated all these companies into the organisation didn't leave in separate or anything. That created quite a lot of turmoil and a little bit of churn of people and on. But I guess, one of the things I learned fairly early on, particularly with my career was not to fear change because a lot of people really worry about change and it’s like ‘oh, my goodness, what happens what's going to happen next’ but what I actually realised very quickly was it created lots of opportunities, and if you are quick to spot it and raise your hand say, ‘well, I can help with this, or I can do that’, then that's half of the way I actually managed to navigate my career, because I saw the opportunities and said, ‘well, can I do this’ and they looked at me and ‘yeah, why not’. That was one thing is to embrace the opportunities that change brings and also never say no, because if you're saying no, they’re probably not going to ask you again and look on somebody else.
I was very fortunate, and it got me all around the world and working with all sorts of people, and it was great fun, we had lots of success. Yeah it was a tremendous career, but who knew, when I was starting off as a geologist that was what would happen.
Cate: But that's fascinating and I think your point about change is spot on. Just from personal experience I’ve been in organisations, where there's either been a change in leadership or there's been a change in the direction that we're going, and I think sometimes it's easy for individuals to get nervous about change, and you don't know what that change is going to bring about. A lot of times when these situations happen, there are two types of people, there are the people that fight the change and don't like the change and want things to stay as they are, which is a lot of those feelings are quite natural, and I think they these changes can sometimes bring about anxiety or trepidation. But similarly the other side, if you just let go of that and trust the situation and trust the process, I think more opportunities do tend to arise and those that jump two feet into it tend to find the change a little bit easier to navigate. That's not to say that it isn't without its challenges, because I think any change will have challenges, but I think sometimes you just have to go with it. There's a lot about our careers that we have to re-evaluate and reassess regularly and reflect is this what I want to be doing if the answer is yes, great if the answer is no, well what, what can I do about it, do I stay and try to change what I’m currently doing do I look elsewhere. I think that as anyone who's working professionally you have to regularly evaluate and reassess and and not just stagnate in what you're doing, especially if it's something that you're not happy with.
It sounds like you had opportunities to really affect change and ensure that that people were on the right path, especially when you went into the role within sales direction. Can you tell me a little bit about your life mentoring and how that started?
Nick: Sure. I originally started mentoring, when I was working at IHS. A colleague came up to me and asked me and he was very talented, but had come from a small organisation and into a much larger one and was struggling to navigate the way the way around and how to do things and how to build a personal brand. So, I helped him and it worked really well and then I had a couple of other people that similarly I helped and then a few others, sort of on a small scale as well. Just sort of helping people navigate the structure and how we worked and how to think about their career and if they were unhappy.
So, when I retired, I thought this would be a great thing to do. The interesting thing was when I was working I had been approached because of the time, the Lapworth Museum was being redeveloped and they asked me whether I would like to be a donor and I said yeah, I’m just quite happy to do that because I have fond memories of the Lapworth Museum because I used to walk through it every morning to get to lectures and back through it and get out again. I do remember how it was and I mean it was filled with incredible fossils in it and incredible things but it was really a need of a major revamp. So, when it was explained to me what they were going to do, I said sure that would be great so I was able to help in a small way to the success of that. At the time, a guy who was looking at Southeast Asia area and he met me and I think he was looking to see if I would donate some more and I said well I’ve stopped working now. I said what can I do, and he was the one who said, well, you could be a mentor, and I went ‘oh really what's that, what does that entail’ and I think he must give me a link on the website whatever and, and then I took it on from there.
The better ones for me, because of my global, overseas experience are with people who've lived or who are living in a different country from where Birmingham is and so on. The next one, I’m just looking at my list here, the next 4 mentees I had, I had one Singaporean who is studying in Birmingham, a Nigerian lady who was studying in Dubai. That was really quite interesting. Then I had a Japanese guy doing a masters at Birmingham and then laterally, a Chinese lady doing a master's in Birmingham as well. I was better placed to advise them and help them in their mentoring, because obviously they were in a foreign country, which is something I was very familiar with. Having to survive and work out what was going on.
Cate: And navigate the cultural differences.
Nick: Exactly, how to do that and so on. Also, make the best of their time at the university as well. It's been a really interesting journey for me, because each of them has been different. They've all been doing different courses. The latter two are on master's courses, so already had some experience of work a little bit and also had obviously a first degree. That was interesting because there are a lot more focused on their next step, and so on. When I had the undergraduates, they were still a little bit unsure about what they were going to do. They weren't in their final year, and so it was helping them to think through things, how things were and think about what sort of careers you don't want to do. If you can’t think of what you want to do, write down the ones you don't want to do. Because, obviously, if you're studying something like business studies there's a wealth of things you can do, so think about what sort of sectors that you might want to do. I guess the formats that I’ve used for each of the mentees has been slightly different. It's very much been tailored to talking to them and getting them to explain to me why they're there, what they're doing, what they want to get out of it and also thoughts about how they getting on, are they comfortable where they are, do they know many people, etc. Just trying to get a sense of where they are. I guess the one common thing with all of them is really helping them have a really excellent CV. Making sure that that's absolutely nailed and then making sure they transfer that to LinkedIn or whatever else they may need to do it. Then also giving them some mock interview questions. With all of them that's the commonality. The rest of it sort of depends on where you feel they need some help. With one, the mentee was a bit concerned about the course and working with small teams and felt that they were not getting the recognition and how to help them to get that. I think one thing, if students are thinking about having a mentor, the nice thing about a mentor is that they're completely agnostic, they have nothing to do with the university, they're not your parents. You can tell them anything and they will give you their considered opinion back. It's a great sounding board. Again the sort of empathy the mentor and mentee has to have good empathy, good relationship and recognise it's confidential discussions. You can be pretty open and honest with them and they can with you, and so the more they are that, the more successful the relationship will be. I think that's something that perhaps people don't realise having a mentor is that it gives you another person to talk to. Sure, you might be able to talk to a tutor at university or your parents at home or whatever, but you still may have some anxieties over things. Your mentor is a is a great person to talk to.
Cate: That's such as important point. I work at the university and many of my colleagues, we always have our students’ best interest at heart, but we work at the university. I think there is always an element of holding back maybe, sometimes for some students or some students might not want to be completely open. I recently heard, there was a study done of international students and their perceptions of career services and one of the bits of feedback was that some international students are nervous that what they say in careers appointments will be available for either academics, or their academic tutors or even prospective employers to see what help and guidance they've sought. I know that not to be true. But there is that and I think also, you raise a valid point about parents. A lot of students and especially international students, their parents will have invested financially heavily in their education and will have quite strong opinions on their career paths, and I think it's not at all that they don't have their son or daughter's best interests at heart, it's that they have opinions. I think sometimes it's nice for students to go to someone that they know is impartial and will offer honest feedback or will be a neutral sounding board for that process, and what they're going through. But also, not just a neutral sounding board but also someone that is able to speak from experience. I think that's where the mentoring scheme really shows much of its value in that we combine that advice and support with real industry experience and workplace experience and experience of having been a student as well. You can really empathise and level with them, whilst also speaking from a path a little bit further down the road, and you can share your experiences and maybe offer a different perspective as well.
When you had the initial meetings with all of your mentees, was there did any of them go into it not knowing at all what to expect or not really knowing what they wanted out of it, but just knowing that they wanted that opportunity for a mentoring relationship or were they all did they all know what they saw it from a mentoring relationship?
Nick: That's a great question. I think the answer is no, I don't think they really understood what they were going to get out of it, or what they could potentially get out of it. Certainly, of the five that I’ve had, I don't think they've ever had a mentor in their in their careers to date. I think they're a little undecided about quite what it was going to do and what reach the mentor had in helping them. The interesting thing was to just talk to them very openly and say this, these are the areas where a mentor can help you and there may be other ones that we think of as we have our discussions further down the line, but I don't use any of the conversations that we have and refer them back to your tutor or to the university or anything like that, it's completely confidential with me. As you said, it’s a good sounding board for the mentees to have.
I can pretty confidently say that when we concluded the relationships, every one of them was delighted to have had the opportunity to have a mentor because they realised that it really did help them, in different ways. Some of them just help them thinking about a job and giving them confidence and saying yeah don't worry you'll get a job, there are jobs out there for you. It is hard I know these days, particularly the way people apply for jobs, if you go through LinkedIn, your chance of your CV being looked by a real person is probably 1 in 1000. I try and explain to them how the process works when you actually get to a real person behind it all, then you get to interview. It is quite challenging and then obviously the CV and the way that you present yourself in there is really important.
It’s helping them think that through and also think through about what they want to do, potentially when they graduate. I think your point you picked up on earlier is it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have to do that for the rest of your life, if you don't like you can change. It's okay, but it will open opportunities for you that you would never know existed, that you may wish to take or you may not wish to take. But once you get in and do things, then it then it's fine.
That's part of it and also helping them to make the best of being at the university. Anything that's given for free, careers talks, the stuff the career guidance that you guys give, joining societies, meeting people all those things. I mean one of the really strong reasons why I went to Birmingham long ago was because it was a campus university and because I’m from Manchester and Manchester isn't a campus university. You saw students all over the place, and I thought well I want somewhere where the students are pretty much together in some form or other so I could meet people from outside my department and so on. It worked really well, and I joined a few societies clubs and things. So, it was encouraging them to do that take that step sometimes a little bit out of their comfort zone for sure, but that's how to make the best of being at university. It will open doors for you and help you, but most of all, make the best of whatever is freely available. If there's an expert talking about a career that sounds interesting, go and listen to them, whatever it may be. I think that's part of the guidance, in helping gently nudge the mentee towards that sort of thing that maybe they were sitting at home thinking well, maybe I can't be bothered, maybe not. But with someone like me saying go do it, it will really pay off.
Cate: That's really important. I think, one of the things that we see with with all of our students, I mention international students because I work mostly with international students. We particularly see this with international students and especially those that are on a one year master's programme, is that they come to the UK at the end of September, they are right away and thrust into their studies, which is the most important bit of why they are coming to Birmingham, but also on top of that they're usually trying to assimilate to a new culture get used to, a lot of times even things like very different weather, linguistical challenges, learning in a different language to what's your native language. There's a lot going on and a lot of challenges, and a lot of students we find focus solely on their studies for the first portion of their programme and then they get to second half, and they start to have a little bit of headspace and start realising that they may have missed out on opportunities that were available to them earlier on in the year as well. So, one of the things that we try and tell students, even at pre-arrival is just get involved in any way that you can, and even if you haven't had paid work experience or an internship or a job as such, that doesn't mean that you're not employable. Employers look really favourably on if you've been involved in societies, if you’ve done volunteering, if you've gotten involved in like the consultancy challenges, or the boot camps and things that we run on campus. All of those give really tangible and experience and help develop those skills that employers are looking for. On top of that, I think, international students, in particular, but this goes for any student that comes to university, they already have an element of resilience and adaptability, just moving outside of your comfort zone, moving to a new city or a new country and adapting to life on campus shows a lot of those skills. It's just about fostering those skill sets and giving students that confidence to really promote themselves, I think that's a lot of a lot of the challenge. You touched upon and there being jobs that students don't even know exist and and looking at what they don't want to do. I think it's really easy for students to look at a list of jobs or in when you fill in any form, you see that list of professions and you have to choose one. Most jobs that exist don't fit within those lists and I think it's so interesting because if you look at most people's career paths, they're doing jobs that seem like quite obscure, are quite unknown anything, ‘how did you even get into that’, but it goes back to what you were saying, where it's following those opportunities and looking at where opportunity presents itself and where your skill sets match, and what you're interested in. We find that we're preparing students now for a world of work that we don't even know what it's going to be like because technology is advancing so quickly that we're now preparing students for jobs that don't even exist yet. Or similarly we're preparing them for jobs that won't exist in 10, 15 years times. It's more about getting that skill set and getting that experience and finding what you enjoy out of a work environment.
It's been absolutely fascinating talking to you, Nick, I’ve really enjoyed this. It's been really nice also to learn about your perspective on career paths, but also on what mentoring means to you. For students who aren't sure about whether mentoring is for them, or they think mentoring is something that is for people that are already established in their career know what they want to do, what would you say to those students who are coming in about whether or not mentoring is for them?
Nick: I would take the opportunity, like with all the opportunities the university offers. They’re there for the taking and they will improve your time at university and potentially your job skills later on. With the mentoring, I would say, definitely take it. You won't necessarily get me but that's fine I’m sure there's many, many other mentors that are far better than I am. I think credit to the university, they've matched me up with me great mentees that I’ve been able to use my, I guess cultural skills, to help mentor and make comfortable and on, so that's really good. I know it's always a little bit of the fear of the unknown for people that they're not quite sure what's going to happen or whatever, but I think the key for having a mentor is that it's somebody that you can talk to confidentially, you can talk about anything from the weather to your career or whatever, whatever makes sense. But it's maybe a calming voice to talk to you sometimes if you're a little stressed, if works getting a bit much and you're struggling or whatever. The mentor, they're there to listen and to try to offer ways to help you be successful because I see the goal of a mentor is to make sure that the person maximizes the time at the university, they're able to come out of it with the qualifications at the level that they wanted to have before they started, and that hopefully you put them on a path to get a really good job by giving them all the skills that they need to do that. It’s a great thing to do. Personally, I get a lot of great benefits out of it just by talking to them and everybody's different, we've all got different challenges and things. Sometimes I can't help specifically with the studies that they're doing, but I understand broadly what's happening and how things are going. Yeah I'd say to anybody who's considering or gets the opportunity to have a mentor just say yes. I mean the worst can happen is, if you don't like it, you can stop. But I would say that's extraordinarily unlikely. I think the for the most cases you'll find that it will be great fun and the mentor is there to talk to you about whatever makes a difference to you. I certainly don't go into it with a prescribed set of things to cover, apart from things like interview skills and CV and maybe assessment centres, which obviously everybody has to use. But the rest of it is very much dictated by the mentee, what they want to talk about, what they want to think about. Sometimes we may start a call and they don't think we've got much to talk about but believe me, every call I’ve had we've got well over an hour. We’ve always found things to talk about so don't even worry about ‘oh, maybe I can't think of anything to talk about’. It's okay, the mentor will come up with me topics that you can discuss. So, yeah jump at the chance to take the opportunity and thrive from it.
Cate: I think that's such good advice, and I think that goes for all aspects of your time at Birmingham or your time in the UK for international students. Make the most of every opportunity, and on this podcast I always ask the question of what recommendations do you have for current you University of Birmingham students. So many people say just get involved and I think that's been a theme throughout this podcast as well, is that, just get involved and try everything and the worst that can happen is you don't enjoy it and you stop doing it. But the benefits far outweigh those risks.
Have you got any other nuggets of advice for current University of Birmingham students with things that you think would really help students make the most of their time at Birmingham or anything else that you wanted to share on that?
Nick: I would take some time out to travel a little bit around the UK. A lot of the mentees I’ve had originally gone to London because it's London and that's what they've heard of. It is great and wonderful and whatever, but then I’ve had some that have set off into Manchester and Scotland just to see the place. For people who are international students studying in Birmingham, make the best of what you've got around you and if you can get some friends and maybe go and travel a little bit and see you see a few places, it's good fun it'll really help. If your English is not great, don't worry, people are fine, they’re all accommodating, and they'll help you so don't feel concerned about stepping way.
Cate: I think that point on travel is really important. I’ve been very fortunate in my current and previous roles to be able to travel and all over the world and meet with employees and meet with prospective students and one of the things that I love most about those opportunities are when I get to even just go for a walk in the evening or between meetings or go and sit down at a local restaurant and try some of the local food. I think anything that gives you a little bit of abroad into perspective or where you get to try something that the previous day you'd never had before, I think all of that expands our perspective and expands our point of view on everything. The UK is such a fantastically diverse place. From the cities to the countryside. I moved to the UK as an international student myself and the amount of people from all over the world that I meet in the UK who are there to take in the scenery and to see the UK, I think it's really easy to stay where you are and get stuck into your studies, but if you can travel and see things and immerse yourself, it's such a fantastic experience.
Nick, thank you much for your time today. It has been really, really lovely speaking to you and learning about your career and also learning about mentoring and the mentoring scheme and what that can offer students, mentees and mentors alike. I think you've provided a really interesting perspective. Thank you so much for joining us today, and then we really appreciate it.
Nick: Well, great thanks, Cate. I mean thanks for the kind words, I really do appreciate having the opportunity to speak on the podcast and hopefully if only one or two more people decide to take up mentoring because of this, then that's great, but hopefully a few more will because, believe me, it's really beneficial both for the mentor and the mentee as well. Hopefully you get the desired results and good luck with the rest of the students and the rest of your podcast.
Cate: Thank you.