An academic ‘home away from home’

Since starting my PhD, the annual British Society of Gerontology (BSG) conference has become a hallmark of my summers. I’ve been lucky enough to go every year so far, and it has blossomed into something I really value.

The thing about BSG is that it’s another community of people who care about ageing, from all kinds of different disciplinary and practical perspectives – just like the ACRC. It has a thriving network for people who are new to ageing-related research, known as ERA, or the Emerging Researchers in Ageing network. 

I’d never hesitate to recommend the BSG conference to researchers interested in ageing and care. It’s a warm and welcoming space, where you’ll get constructive interest in your work, and find your imagination sparked by others’. (Although the last two conferences have been held in a heatwave – so perhaps someone is taking ‘warm’ too literally!)

Each year I’ve done something different: a poster, a six-minute Pecha Kucha at last year’s ERA conference, a full contribution to the Educational Gerontology symposium this year. Through this, I can track how I’ve grown as an early-career researcher, in how I understand my work, and how I’ve learned to communicate it to others. It’s lovely to look back and see progress that you’re otherwise always doubting.

But there is something far more valuable than the individual conferences – for me, that’s been ‘finding my people’ and getting stuck in.

I joined the BSG ERA committee last year as Mentoring Coordinator, helping to connect early-career and more-experienced researchers or professionals who share an interest in ageing. The committee is responsible for running the annual ERA conference before the main BSG event, so all of us get stuck in with that too. This year, there has also been a fantastic collaboration between BSG ERA and the Journal of Global Ageing (JoGA) to create publication opportunities for first-time authors. Committee members like me got to help run practical workshops alongside editor-led training.

These initiatives all reflect the BSG’s commitment to nurturing the ageing-related research community, and providing opportunities for new researchers to learn and grow.

Within the ACRC Academy, we’ve benefited from BSG’s support, and we have also given back. Wanok and I ran a practical workshop on leadership skills at the ERA conference in 2024, based on the project our cohort had done during our taught year. While there, we met Christoph Heuser, one of the book review editors for Ageing & Society. Christoph and his colleague Heather Mulkey then ran a training session for ACRC students on writing book reviews, which is still available in our SharePoint collection of useful resources.

What else? Well, Kayla and I spent two days in Leicester this summer, on a writing retreat funded by BSG. I workshopped my Pecha Kucha presentation with a small group of ACRC PhD colleagues who share an interest in unequal ageing, and we co-wrote a paper that’s now out for peer review. Mengxing Joshi, the force behind the BSG ERA x JoGA collaboration, delivered an inspiring ACRC Academy seminar this spring, sharing her work on ethnicity, migration and ageing, as well as her own early-career journey. And when the unreasonable heat disrupted my train travel home this summer, I was really lucky to have the kind companionship of former BSG President, Prof Judith Phillips, all the way back to Glasgow. (I’ve tucked away her advice on book-writing for a project that still feels like a distant dream, but one that seems a little less unreal thanks to someone taking the time to share her real-life experience and wisdom with me...)

‘Finding your people’ will look different for each of us. I’ve anchored myself in ageing and care through BSG, but also in public health, through the Faculty of Public Health. The anchors that work best for you will depend on what your professional or academic identity is, or what you want it to be – and you needn’t worry if you don’t know what that looks like right now!

I’ve butterflied my way around lots of different conferences throughout my PhD, too, and I hope to keep doing so. I think that breadth of audiences and perspectives is vital, both for trying to make sure my work reaches people who can use it, and for keeping my own mind refreshed. 

But I also think that there’s a lot to be said for a steady and consistent commitment, a network that you keep returning to. Our PhDs will end (one day!), our roles and perhaps our institutions will change. Having a community of practice, an academic ‘home away from home’ that you can belong to wherever you go, feels to me like a really valuable thing. Whatever that looks like for you, I hope you get as much support and encouragement out of it, as the past three years of BSG have given to me.