Skills For Life Lecturer
Cambridge Regional College

Julie-Anne W

00.01 My name is Julie-Anne W and I’m a skills for life lecturer at Cambridge Regional College. Basically I teach key skills which are application, which is numeracy, communications, literacy and ICT to students predominantly in the construction academy here at Cambridge Regional College. They’re aged between 16-19 but we do have a variety of ages.

00.27 I was a bit of a school swat, to be honest. I skipped a year very early on and I had to do very well otherwise they’d put me back down a year so I always tried to, I was a bit of a slogger. I wasn’t, it wasn’t natural, to be honest and I did work myself into the ground a little bit. I quite enjoyed school, the majority of the time. I was bullied a lot when I was younger because I was the kid with the braces that looked like a Telly Tubby as I was running down the field and I was the youngest in the year.

00.57 But I think what doesn’t break you makes you stronger and that made me determined, because the way that I could actually beat other people, I couldn’t run very fast, was actually to do it in the tests and to actually do what I wanted to do as opposed to what everybody else told me to. So that was quite, it was quite character building, actually.

01.16 I remember picking up my early school but at primary school I wanted to be a lawyer. Secondary school, for some unknown reason, I wanted to be an accountant, which stayed with me until my final year of university when all my friends had actually finished and were actually doing their accountancy courses and hated it, because it was the hardest year they had to do to pass their exams and I sort off it at that point, to be honest. And after that I didn’t quite know what I was going to do. So I took a little bit of time off and had a few months off and went off to be a holiday rep.

01.44 As far as turning points are concerned, there were quite a few. When I was a holiday rep I had a bit of an accident. I was used to people throwing me in the pool. However, this particular night they didn’t actually make sure that I fell in the pool. So I hit the back of my head and I was actually quite, I was unconscious, I was quite bad. My Dad’s an osteopath, he flew out, he helped me and I basically had to live at home for about 14 months with constant work on me to be able to sort of speak, hear, walk properly and everything else. Because I really was out of it. I could fall asleep, narcoleptic for about 12 months afterwards.

02.14 I was always pretty positive anyway, but I sort of realised when I couldn’t do a lot of things and I couldn’t function and it was quite frustrating and I thought, “Right, okay, this is a time, sit back, what do you actually want to do? What other options are open to you?” And I started talking to people. I was very lucky, I was stuck in the house so I was dealing, my father works from home, so I was dealing with his patients and I was talking to them as they came in, trying to find out what they did. So that’s when I started going and doing the part time work at social services.

02.45 Went back to uni and when I came up here I started being involved in language schools, getting more involved. I’m more of a people person. I can do the admin, don’t always like doing it, and after that then I got involved in the teaching and being more front of house.

03.02 I am a very keen rugby supporter. As you can tell from the accent, I’m Welsh, I’ve lived away for a very long time but I do support, go home and support my local team as much as possible, The Ospreys. I’m also into a little bit of belly dancing. Just because why not? Yes, you don’t have to be thin to do it, so it’s a bit of a laugh, we have a good, we’re meant to be doing a show in the next couple of days in front of lots of different people, that’s quite nerve wracking.

03.30 In five years time I don’t quite know where I’m going to be. I take my career as being quite organic. I’ll see who I meet, what comes up. I might like to work in the international schools. I had some relationships with them when I was in my previous roles. Ideally, I would probably like to go back home at some point. I miss the coast and people who speak funny like me. So that’s where I’d like to be. As far as what I’m doing, I have no idea. Another thing I’d like to do maybe is actually do a personal trainer, believe it or not. That’s something else I’m going to tick off on my list.