Educator. Writer. Editor. Researcher. Academic. Writing coach. What can I say? I contain multitudes.

I started out my professional life as an administrator. Balancing the demands of roles that involved everything from project managing high-level research and annual reports to making sure the office fridge didn’t end up full of unidentifiable mouldy things in plastic containers helped me become efficient, organised, and great at figuring out what needs to be done in what order.

I left admin to study to be a secondary teacher of English, English as an additional language, and history. Learning to teach gave me a deep understanding of learning, and suited my compassionate, inclusive, and analytical nature to a T.

After I finished my teaching qualification – and drawing on the deep reserve of my love for all things related to learning – I took on a PhD in education and history at the University of Melbourne. My project explored the ways we learn with confronting and contentious content in museums and historic sites. Doing the PhD supercharged my writing abilities and taught me how to interview and conduct qualitative research in sensitive contexts.

While I worked on my PhD, I taught subjects and worked as a research assistant in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. This experience strengthened my capacity to teach adult learners in engaging and inclusive ways and helped me to develop research skills in a wide range of qualitative methodologies. I was good enough at these roles to be offered a part-time tenure-track role in the faculty before I even graduated, quickly progressing from there to a full-time role.

As a fully-fledged academic, I wrote a lot, supported students at all stages of university study, supported and project managed and led a whole host of research projects and evaluations, contributed to committees, played a pivotal role in the shift to remote learning during the pandemic, developed a keen interest in research ethics and integrity, and basically became indispensable to a whole lot of people, who were then a bit miffed when – right around the time I was about to be offered tenure – I quit.

I (mostly) left academia in 2021 to build my freelance business and to get back to doing more of the work I love the most: working with people to create learning experiences for diverse learners and supporting early career academics to learn to navigate the demands of academia.