On being poor and being an academic.

Image from the Stephan Bulger gallery.

Being an academic is hard. It is often low pay for long hours and constant pressure, but, in my opinion, great reward. You become a professional thinker, a paid explorer, an accredited know-it-all in the field of your choosing. When I was young, people who had degrees, masters’ degrees and PhD were at the pinnacle of human experience, amazing explorers and I wanted, more than anything, to join their ranks. Wanting to be an academic was an odd dream for a poor girl from an estate, even if I was always well spoken and slightly prim for where I came from; a legacy of my all too amazing mother, who is slightly snobby, and has an aversion to the harsh, slang filled accent of my peers.

I remember being about 5, one of my earliest memories of school was being told I couldn’t read a book because it was for the older children; it sat there with its tempting boring cover, glorious small print and lack of pictures, unattainable because of someone bigger than me said so, I wanted it so bad, and I did not want to be told I couldn’t read it. In possibly my first act of rebellion against authority, I stole the book and spent the evening at home, after tea, pouring over the too-small text, full of words I didn’t know… and I loved it. It was my first experience of being outside my comfort zone, and as frustrating as it was, it felt good.

I would love to tell you that I spent the rest of my life fighting to be the best, ending up graduating from Oxford University at the top of my class and laughing in the face of any snobbish person I had encountered, riding off into the sunset to be rich and fabulous, but alas, that didn’t happen. I, like most people I know who were bright but poor, got bored, got stressed, got distracted and got off the path of University because the constant battle against the odds seemed way to hard compared to a comfy life in a mediocre job with easy to meet expectations. I slouched back on to the educational path eventually, more out of boredom and a wish to escape Yorkshire than anything else, and went to a middle of the road, working class university in London, (London South Bank University). I was no great academic great rising up from the slums, this was no ‘Good Will Hunting’; it is very rarely like that, I was just a young woman looking for her place in life, working class but with too much ambition and a low threshold for boredom, which drove me away from the jobs I had encountered. The great thing is, that at university, I found my passion, a weird passion, but the thing that drives my interest, keeps me peaked and definitely not bored; neuroscience and auditory cognition.

When I stopped being an undergrad of psychology at a working class London university, and progressed to being a post grad at a Russell group university, I all of a sudden had an identity crisis, coupled with some of the worst panic attacks I have ever encountered. I felt like an impostor, an idiot, a tiny girl who had fallen into the class with the big guns and was just in ever so much trouble when the teacher spotted her. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and boy did I know it.

It is not just the puzzled looks when you say you have to waitress 20 hours a week on top of my studies so I can eat, (“how do you find the time?”) or the groans of “I am so poor” when my fellow students can’t afford luxuries that have always been far out of my reach. It is also the lack of ability I have to do things to further my career, I can’t go to conferences unless I get funding, self-publish or spend my downtime promoting myself, because my downtime is spent in a restaurant, call centre or other badly paid role so I can pay my bills. I wasn’t able to do a million internships, play an instrument, learn four languages or have other amazing extracurricular activities because I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and worked meaningless jobs since I was 16 to survive. I try not to be bitter, but it is very hard on the days when your bank decides to reduce your overdraft unexpectedly and there is no mum and dad to bail you out, and you just can’t lend anymore money from people.

I am lucky, I have had people (or a person) in my life who believes in me, and was willing to lend me a large amount of money for a long time so I could do my masters, without him, it just would not have been possible, and without my mum lending me cash, giving me cash and most recently, buying me emergency make up because I had run out with no spare cash to buy more, (no, really), I would just not be here. Without these people in my life, and an extra-ordinary inability to give up when I probably should, I would not be here, doing what I truly love.

Recently, I have been thinking of all the people like me who didn’t get here, or where they deserve to be, because of money. The people who could have been great, but just didn’t want to invest in their future by being extremely poor in the present, or who just, like me, didn’t get the grades they expected at alevel because they worked too many hours to stay on their feet, or at degree level, and the amount of amazing great people out there who never did masters because the fees are just so damn high, and the work load difficult to balance with the amount of paid work you need to do too.

Yes there are bursaries, yes there are funds, but they are few and far between, and too often not means tested, ending up in a vicious loop of people not getting funds because they are not good enough, because they need to do paid work not extracurricular activities, which leads to them not being good enough for the grants. This is not meant to be an excuse for any past bad grades or lack of achievement, or spitting on the people who did make it from the bottom to the top, but rather my look at life from where I am, and at the moment, I feel I am on the precipice of mount working class, and as I reach for the stars, any false move will send me tumbling back down to the ground.