Senior Project Coordinator
Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC)

Jen R

00:01 My name’s Jen R, and I’m a senior project coordinator and a hubs manager I work for a company called Crac but I work on the Vitae programme. The vitae programme’s funded by the research councils UK and we work towards realising the potential of researchers. So we may provide courses for post graduate researchers to attend, we also support research staff in helping post graduate researchers.

00:27 My job is kind of split into two halves really, the first half is the senior project coordinator side and I get involved very much with the director of Vitae working with her and on any projects that are involved that she’s working on and also I work as a Hubs manager dealing with the communications between myself, the central team of the Vitae programme and we also have 8 Hubs.

00:53 I started out my career as a PA but then I moved into publishing for around 10 years, I unfortunately got made redundant before I took on the role at Crac and I have unfortunately been in the position where I’ve had to actually be part of a team to make other people redundant as well, which I have to say is nasty and I don’t want to have to do that again in a hurry.

01:17 And for me both of the redundancies that have happened to me have meant that I’ve gone on to do something else which has been better, or changed me in some way. Or changed the way I think about things, and I think that’s a good thing really.

01:33 I moved around schools quite a lot when I was younger because my dad is a civil engineer so, and when I at primary school I was in the UK but then at the age of 6 I moved over to Iraq, so I had a period of 6 years studying abroad as a child and that again is quite a character building not that I knew it at the time but quite a character building experience.

02:00 I did 2 years at boarding school because of the fact that the level of study over in an international school wasn’t going to be quite the same as I was going to get over here and had I continued over there it would have put me back a few years probably here so, it made sense for me to come back to the UK. My brother was already in a boarding school over here so I went to the same one as him, so I didn’t feel really isolated cos my brother was there as well. It didn’t really suit me very much. I would say I disliked it, I didn’t like being in a room with 8 other girls, their backgrounds were very different to mine, they had families that were wealthier than mine and it makes you different. And I didn’t want to be different I didn’t want to have this stigma attached to me of that’s the girl she’s different you know and unfortunately I did. So I didn’t really get on very well with that.

02:52 With regards to university I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted and so I decided to go simply for the reason that it would give me another 4 years to think about what I wanted to do.

03:04 My degree was in Italian so absolutely nothing to do with what I’ve ended up doing.

03:10 Even when you don’t know what you want to do, doing a degree gives you it gives you experience away from home, that is if you live away from home and I did, with the Italian degree I did a 4 year course rather than a 3 year course and one year of that was away in Italy on my own and that was probably the first time I’d been away from home on my own, living on my own, managing my own money that kind of thing. For me going to Italy was a real life changing experience.

03:40 I think the background that I’ve had has definitely shaped the person that I am. I think moving around a lot when you’re younger does mean that you learn a little bit more to adapt a bit more quickly to a new situation because you have to, you have to get on with it. I think the crux of everything that you do is that you should enjoy what you’re doing. If you’re stuck doing something you don’t like doing, change it.

04:04