Principal Lecturer, Law
London South Bank University

Louise A

00:00:03 My name is Louise A. I work at London South Bank University. I’m a principle lecturer in law, and I’m also the director of recruitment and marketing for the faculty of arts and human sciences. I think what I’m most passionate about in my job is to see the difference that we make to our students, to see what they do when they leave with this knowledge, confidence, and skills, and they leave our courses and they become what they want to be. That is the best part of my job and it inspires me to do more.

00:00:34 Well, when I was a young girl at school we didn’t have much careers advice back then. If you had said to me ‘You’re going to be a university lecturer, I would have laughed. I really didn’t know. School for me was a nightmare. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t relating learning to the real world, so school for me wasn’t the best experience at all.

00:00:59 My parents hadn’t gone to university themselves. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father, who I hugely admired, he worked his way up. He went into a firm – J Lyons and Company – and he started doing washing up and he ended up being one of their chief accountants, and always said to his kids ‘It’s best if you get yourselves a good education because your life will be so much easier. You can go into a firm or a company at a much higher level’, so that’s why I was strongly encouraged to go to university by my parents.

00:01:33 I appreciated the value of the advice that my parents had given me as soon as I went to university, from the first day because of all the… It’s all the people that you meet, like-minded people, people who are completely different from you, people from all over the world, and the friendships that you form, and I saw hey, learning can be fun. You can study a subject that you really enjoy, in a lot of depth, in a fun way. It was a major, major turning point for me.

00:02:03 Something inside me said ‘I want a profession.’ And I met up with an old friend from university and she told me about something called the graduate diploma in law. I have to confess that I was really influenced by lots of programmes on television, and at the time there was something called LA Law. It just showed the glamorous side of being a lawyer, and I have to say it isn’t as glamorous as the programmes make out, but that’s why I wanted to be a lawyer.

00:02:31 I managed to get into one of the big city law firms and I discovered very quickly that I’d made the wrong choice. I didn’t enjoy it at all. In the city your clients are insurance companies, for example, or banks, whereas I like to work with people, so Mr Jones and Mr Smith would have been a better bet for me. They wouldn’t have paid me as well, but I would have been much, much happier.

00:02:58 Single event that has made the biggest impact on my life is having my son. That was fourteen years ago. Because once you have a child, you don’t just think of yourself. You wake up in the morning and you think I’ve got x, y, and z, but I’ve also got my son to think about and how am I going to fit everything into a whole day? Your whole life changes when you have children, so the biggest impact on my life has been my son but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

00:03:27 When I’m not at London South Bank University, and I’m not lecturing, and I’m not involved in recruiting and meeting kids in schools, I really love cooking and baking because it’s something completely different, something creative, and I just love to see the response of friends and family when they eat my cakes.

00:03:46 Well the best thing really is to do a job that you enjoy and to get paid for it. That’s the ideal job, and I feel I’m in it already.