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Fiona Denney

Fiona Denney

00:02 My name is Fiona Denney I’m the Head of Graduate Development at King's College London.

00:06 Basically I’m in charge of training and development for research staff and research students at King's, which involves putting together and providing a central programme of training and development opportunities for researchers and working within the organisation to support anything, any activities that might support their training and development.

00:27 I grew up in a very academic education focussed household. I was clearly academically bright at school and in some ways that’s an advantage, in some ways it’s a significant disadvantage, socially it’s not a great advantage because you’re seen as being this sort of swat. But it was always an expectation really that I would use that academic ability and go onto University.

00:56 I was state educated but I did the 11+ and I went to a grammar school so everybody tended to be fairly bright anyway so I suspect I wasn’t given as hard a time as I would have done if I’d been in a, a comprehensive. When I went on to do A level I really wanted to do English, history and biology but because of the way the subjects were grouped on the timetable I actually wasn’t able to do biology in the end and I ended up doing sociology instead. In spite of being very well qualified actually what I realised was that most employers wanted experience and they wanted somebody who wasn’t coming to them with a string of letters after their name but actually was coming to them being able to demonstrate that they could do a particular job.

01:40 I wrote letter after letter after letter to a large number of charities and other organisations and that particular charity had an opening, they were looking for somebody cheap and at that particular point I was fairly cheap and they initially started me out I think it was something like a 3 month contract but it was better than nothing and it was a good starting point.

02:06 My mum is an incredibly strong character, she was actually, she actually trained as a primary school teacher initially and then left teaching because she didn’t enjoy it and went onto become a secretary and a, a PA and between the two of them they’ve been a very influential parent on my life.

02:25 My PHD was really tough, it was something that I’d always assumed at some point I would do because I grew up in a household where my father had a PHD. I think it was really tough because actually I wasn’t dedicated to the subject area. In the end I was able to finish my PHD because I was able to see the importance of, of that generic process to what I’d decided to go into, to the career choice that I’d made but actually in terms of the subject matter it didn’t engage me sufficiently to enjoy the actual research myself and as a result I went through significant patches of being extremely de-motivated and in fact depressed. I was actually diagnosed with clinical depression so it was fairly severe at that particular time and I had other significant personal problems in my life I was married at the time and my marriage was, was a real problem area and in the end I, I made the decision that really the marriage had to come to an end and I needed to leave that particular situation. So that was a very difficult period in my life.

03:35 My life philosophy is that life is a learning experience and that out of the bad things, out of the negative aspects in life there are still very positive things that come out and there are growth points for all of us and I think that actually our, our most growing in terms of our own personal development occurs actually at the hardest times and at the lowest points.