Flipping the Script: Reverse Mentoring & the Power of Lived Experience - Adventures in Advising

Do you know what reverse mentoring is and its benefits? In this episode, Matt and Ryan sit down with Rachael O’Connor from University of Leeds to explore how reverse mentoring and relationship-centered advising can transform campus culture, especially for working class and first-gen students. From her journey from tax law to teaching, to building staff/student partnerships that actually change policies, Rachael shares real wins, real challenges, and no-fluff strategies you can use next week.

You’ll learn:

• What reverse mentoring is (and isn’t)
• Smart ways to make personal tutoring/advising more equitable and authentic
• How to navigate power dynamics without losing momentum
• Why “imposter syndrome” hits working-class students differently
• Practical, repeatable meeting structures that turn good intentions into action

About our guest: Rachael O’Connor is an Associate Professor in Legal Education and the University Academic Lead for Personal Tutoring at the University of Leeds, a former solicitor, and a trustee with LawCare. Her award-winning work builds student-led initiatives where lived experience is treated as expertise—and it’s seriously changing the game.

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• 9:17 (Cont.) Flipping the Script: Reverse Mentoring & the Power of Lived Experience - Adventures in Advising

Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hey and welcome back to the adventures in advising podcast. This is Matt Markin along with Ryan shekel. Ryan excited for this episode?

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, absolutely. What a chance to think about the way we interact with students differently and and hear a really fascinating perspective on on the higher ed context. Super excited to talk with our guest today.

Matt Markin  
Do you know much about reverse mentoring? 

Ryan Scheckel  
I don't want to be seen as endorsing anything anywhere. But I will say that there was a chapter I read in a book about partnership, in particular, the framework of partnership in higher education institutions and partnering with students. It's a free book. If anyone wants to hit me up, I'll talk about a little bit with anyone. But I think the way that we consider the dynamic between institutions and their representatives and the students who are at those institutions definitely is worth a rethink on every side of the conversation.

Matt Markin  
Well, yeah, I think that's a great segue to bring in our guest today, and that is Rachael O'Connor. Hi, Rachael, how are you?

Rachael O'Connor  
Hello, I'm good. Thank you. How are you doing? 

Matt Markin  
Very well. So let's go ahead and give you a formal introduction. So Rachael is an associate professor in legal education and university academic lead for personal tutoring at the University of Leeds and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Now a non practicing solicitor, formerly a tax lawyer, Rachael is also trustee of legal mental health charity law care. She comes from a working class background and was first generation in her family to attend university. This drives Rachael's passion for improving experiences and opportunities for underrepresented students and Amplifying Voices of underrepresentation as an educator and also as a researcher, Rachael's research focuses on developing authentic staff student partnerships through reverse mentoring and other relationship centered approaches within higher education and beyond, Rachael leads many reverse mentoring initiatives involving students from a range of underrepresented backgrounds across disciplines, developing their lived experience expertise, mentoring university staff, leaders, police and legal professionals. She has won prizes and published several papers for this work, Rachael's recent research includes a focus on the experiences and intersectional identities of working class students in higher ed. Rachael is currently leading a community centered personal tutoring Transformation Project at the University of Leeds. So I think a lot of things that we'll be talking about today with you, but maybe can expand upon the bio. Can you tell us a little bit more about your path and higher ed what we like to ask? What's your origin story?

Rachael O'Connor  
Sure, and thank you. So I yeah, as you kind of mentioned in the introduction, I'm first in family, or first generation into higher education. So I grew up in a city called hull in the north of England, and my Yeah, I come, as I said in in my kind of introduction, I come from a working class background, so not particularly from a background where it was expected that I would go to university, let alone expected that I would become a lawyer. So it was kind of a lot of for me, me and my sister, a lot of kind of firsts in our family and in our kind of local area. And I ended up, I still can remember, kind of sitting in my Sixth Form College, in a in a computer cluster, and thinking, What on earth am I going to do with my life? Didn't particularly get much help there, with sort of University, with careers, with what to do next, and yeah, I'd been to Leeds a few times. I love music, so I'd been to Leeds on the train a few times to go to gigs. And I thought, Oh, be cool to go there. And it was almost a case of, kind of closing my eyes and scrolling through all the degrees, and I ended up applying to study law with accountancy, and yeah, that was kind of my path into higher education as a student. And then I had, I had a probably very typical experience. Going to a place like University of Leeds, which is an elite UK university. It's a Russell Group University. There were not many people there from backgrounds like mine, despite it being an hour away from my hometown. And I think because of that, I had a really strong determination to succeed. It was almost like and some of the students that I've worked with in my research have described this like I didn't have a choice but to succeed, like failing just wasn't going to be an option, because there was nothing else to fall back on, and I certainly couldn't go home without, you know, coming back as a lawyer. So that that saw me kind of following a very what I now see is quite a traditional, like corporate path into the law. I was lucky, I guess, to get a job offer at an international law firm, and I went and trained there and ended up becoming a corporate tax lawyer. Now, with the greatest of respect to all of the corporate tax lawyers out there that I know and love, if you'd have asked me when I was a kid, who do is, do I when I grow up? Do I want to be a corporate tax lawyer? I don't think that would have been met with a resounding yes. So I had kind of a challenging few years once I qualified, where I was really starting to struggle with you know, why do I do this job? Do I really care about it? How does it align with my values? And that's partly, how does it align with, like, my working class roots, but also, how does it align with that passion that I had as a young person to make a difference to and it sounds kind of cliche, but it's true, like I wanted to do I went to university, and I studied really hard because I wanted to do something, you know, that would help others, that would make a difference, that would make me feel good in the process. And corporate law just wasn't delivering that for me. So I guess I took the kind of bold step after only four years in practice, to move into academia, and I ended up back at the University of Leeds as a lecturer. I'm a teaching and scholarship academic, which means I primarily focus on teaching and I do pedagogic research as a sort of, I guess, smaller part of my job than some other colleagues who are more research focused. But yeah, it was all kind of happenstance, really. I saw the job on Twitter as it was then, and they the School of Law at Leeds just happened to be looking for people that could teach tax law. So it was a bit which, I don't know if it's the same in other countries, but in the UK, that's relatively niche. So it was kind of like the stars aligned, and I thought, Oh, why don't I just kind of go and give this a go, and it turned out to be the best decision. So here I am, kind of seven years later, finally doing a job that I love.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, I know so many people have a similar story about my initial motivations for higher education or further education not ending up in the place I thought I would. And a lot of people who are in the work of academic advising, personal tutoring, have similar stories that they came to that role as well, not because it was necessarily their primary thought out of high school or secondary education. So can you tell us a little bit about how your journey at Leeds has led to this role in personal tutoring and your work there?

Rachael O'Connor  
Yeah, and I think that that merely links to what you've just said, actually, because again, even when I started my job in academia, although I took a teaching focus role, my intention at the outset was that I would be a researcher in tax law, and that I eventually would kind of work towards doing a PhD in Tax law and kind of move towards that more research, like discipline, research based job, and then so things were going well. I was kind of developing my teaching practice. I've always been a personal tutor, since I started at Leeds, and it was. And do you remember that interesting time around March 2020 that was when, yeah, a lot of things changed for me, as they did for everybody around the world, at the start of the of the Covid-19 pandemic. And I had an opportunity in my school to take on a leadership role. And I became the director of student support in the School of Law at Leeds. This was kind of this around the summer of 2020, and within that role, I took leadership responsibility for what we refer to as academic, personal tutoring in the School of Law. So that was sort of my first opportunity to get involved in the sort of behind the scenes and sort of policy and strategy of personal tutoring. Whereas prior to that, I'd kind of been, you know, going along in my personal tutoring practice, and I knew I enjoyed it, and, you know, it was great talking one to one with students, supporting them on their journeys, but I'd never really thought about, why is this important, and how can we make it better, so that that leadership role in School of Law kind of really gave me that opportunity, but moreover, kind of, being the Director of Student Support meant that I was involved in leadership but development, and working with a whole range of colleagues who were doing the sort of on The ground supporting of students, from professional services, colleagues who who are not in academic roles and doing that work at such a fundamentally challenging time for every student, whether they're they were disabled students, students, you know, from different backgrounds and identities, who were maybe already facing challenges at university. You know, that was a time when every student was kind of dealing with at least something, and I think I feel lucky that I was able to to be in that role at that time, when I feel like there was a greater opportunity than ever, I guess, to make, make a real difference to students. And don't get me wrong, there were plenty of students during that time who you know were just dealing with too many things you know had to withdraw from the course, things like that. But there are a lot of students during that time who I supported, and I were I supported with my colleagues who, and it kind of really gave me that insight into this is what a really, a really meaningful staff student relationship can achieve as a partnership. So that was that was kind of the first time when I started to think I wanted to get more involved with personal tutoring across the university. I should say one thing I didn't mention is that when I was a student at Leeds. I had an amazing academic personal tutor. And I think, you know, I mentioned the kind of struggles that I faced at that time, sort of being a first generation working class student in in a university where there were not many other people like me, and there were several points, especially at the beginning, where I was very ready to give it up and move back home. And she the conversations that we had, kept me there like undoubtedly. So I've always kind of had that personal motivation of, you know, I want to be able to do that for somebody else, but it was only when I when I when I've got this leadership role, that I began to see actually, yes, I can be a good personal tutor and I can make a difference. But what I'm really passionate about as well, is helping others to become, you know, impactful personal tutors and to encourage through, through my leadership, but through my research as well, to encourage more and more staff to recognize and to harness, you know, the the power that they have, but to use it in a positive way, to to, you know, develop and empower our students. 

Matt Markin  
Yeah, really appreciate you sharing that story. I can imagine listeners right now being like I can really relate to things that Rachael has just talked about, whether it's someone that helped them out and guided them in their time at an institution, or some of those struggles being like a first generation working class student. And you know, I think connected to this, and you were mentioning kind of the research that you do as well, and much of your research also explores something called reverse mentoring and relationship centered approaches. And for listeners who may not be familiar, can you explain what reverse mentoring is, and maybe what makes it distinct from traditional mentoring?

Rachael O'Connor  
Yeah, sure. So I came across reverse mentoring again in legal practice. So it was, I guess, for context when I kind of came across it there it was being used as an equity, diversity and inclusion initiative to try and get, at that time, more women into senior leadership positions in the in the law firm, the particular law firm that I was working for, the idea behind reverse mentoring is quite literal, if, if you think about what you might label as a sort of more traditional mentoring relationship. I I often think about when I was a student, I had a mentor in professional practice. So when I was a second year law student, I signed up to a mentoring scheme, and there was a senior lawyer in a local law firm who mentored me, and he helped me do things like improve my applications for jobs at law firms. He helped me to kind of build my network, that kind of thing. And he gave me advice about, you know, what it's like to be a lawyer, how to kind of develop my skills. So reverse mentoring in that scenario, would switch things around, and it would place me, you know, the junior, the law student, in the role of mentor. So often we think about the person who is the mentor as being the one who has the expertise, the one who's got the knowledge to pass or to share with somebody else that the other person the mentee can learn from. So yeah, reversing those roles in that example, then would be thinking about, how does that senior lawyer perhaps, who is, well, I'd already shared those different he was a different gender to me, but also maybe he is someone who's involved in graduate recruitment. He's involved in outreach work in the law firm pro bono work. He supervises junior lawyers. Maybe so by in being mentored by me, he would get an insight into what is it like currently to be a young working class woman studying in the local area and trying to get a job in the legal profession. Like, what are the what are the challenges? What are the barriers? How do I see and experience things through that lens? So it's recognizing those lived experience insights of being somebody who is perhaps underrepresented or marginalized in a particular space, and recognizing recognizing that lived experience is expertise and as something that has, importantly, something that has power to make change, to make people who have power in a traditional sense, in terms of being able to change things, to Make rules, to make policies giving those people are supporting those people to see things differently and therefore ultimately make more equity centered informed decisions that allow them to kind of see and think beyond the limits of their own experiences.

Ryan Scheckel  
So in the time that you spent sort of in the reverse mentoring space, have you found examples of that practice outside of law, or is there something unique to the legal side of where the world, where that may have developed? Or is there a reason that you found it there?

Rachael O'Connor  
I think, I think one of the reasons why it is popular in the legal field is because it is such a hierarchical sector, and it is very it's, you know, it's got a long history. It's very, very traditional discipline, and there are a lot of it has. It has quite a obviously, there are variations on this, but it has quite a particular culture, and there are a lot of norms kind of embedded into i. What it means to be a lawyer, and also what it means to be a student of law. And I think that is why, when I came into academia, and I was kind of fresh out of corporate practice, so it didn't have any any research, you know, starting from zero, and I was thinking, what? Well, what do I want to do? Okay, well, I was really interested in reverse mentoring, so now is my time to actually sit and I can ponder about it a bit. Let me see, is there actually any research behind any of this? Because it's not necessarily something that you look at when you're kind of just involved in the practice and you're not an academic, and I found a few studies, a few small studies that had looked at reverse mentoring in the higher education context. But they were, they were kind of, sort of case study type reports describing what what had happened, and I struggled to find much research in terms of empirical, empirical research with kind of data gathered from participants. So yeah, that was kind of the decision I made to start doing some of that and kind of building the field of reverse mentoring in that higher education context. So my research has primarily focused on reverse mentoring in higher education. Broadly, I've done some law specific studies, but much of my work has involved students from across disciplines, different backgrounds, identities, levels, mentoring people who are in senior leadership positions within universities and also in other other organizations, like law firms. But there is, there's definitely in the time the sort of five or five or six years, maybe that I've been conducting reverse mentoring studies and researching it. There's, there's been a real, a real growth, I think, in the amount of reverse mentoring that's going on in lots of different areas. So lots of reverse mentoring happens in the medical field as well. You know, like within in the UK, we have the NHS and there's, there's quite a lot of reverse mentoring work that goes on there, particularly in the medical field, lots of working with lived experience experts, i.e., you know, patients or people that are, that are living with particular conditions, illnesses, etc, and those people kind of mentoring medical practitioners, but also people who are, you know, in leadership roles in kind of medical organizations. So, yeah, I think it, it still is a really growing area, and it's, it's really kind of interesting and exciting, I think, to see it, to see it being used in different ways. But I've certainly found it a really important and impactful mechanism for supporting both staff in the higher education context, supporting both staff or leaders and students to really rethink their positions in terms of their kind of relationships with one another.

Matt Markin  
Can you talk about maybe some of the like, the intersections between like reverse mentoring and personal tutoring?

Rachael O'Connor  
Sure. Well, I actually, I conducted a fellowship project a couple of years ago now. So at Leeds, we have the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence, which is like our Central University research hub for pedagogic research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And I developed a project, and they supported me with the fellowship and with funding to kind of pursue it, where I was looking at exactly that so using reverse mentoring as a vehicle to explore personal tutoring, but through the lens of underrepresented identities. So I recruited a team of students, and we worked together for the first year of the project, and we co designed a reverse mentoring scheme. So it was a team of 15 students who all identified in some way in in in really 15 very different ways as to why they felt underrepresented at the university, and they came from kind of across the 15 about 12 different schools and disciplines. And yeah, we could develop this reversement. Tutoring scheme that then rolled out the following year, and that involved staff who so I told you I had a leadership role in the School of Law, where I was in charge of personal tutoring. So that role is replicated in all of our disciplines at Leeds, it was staff who were in that discipline based personal tutoring leadership role were mentored by a student from a different discipline about their personal tutoring experiences. And the idea behind that was, so far as you can call reverse mentoring traditional. It started out as a traditional reverse mentoring scheme, sort of focused on the students identity, getting to know each other, supporting the staff mentee to learn about a perspective that's different to their own. But then as the relationship went on, the focus switched to a sort of, more of a maybe action research focus, you might call it, where they would then together co developing proposals to take to the university about how we could enhance personal tutoring across the institution. And it's interesting when I reflect on some of the data out of that project, and particularly I was going to say, particularly what the students said, but actually what the staff reflect. What the staff reflected on as well they a lot of them described their reverse mentoring relationship as like the best personal tutoring relationship ever, and that was because they met each other regularly, sort of every two to three weeks, for almost a full year. When they met, they met for around about an hour. So it was, you know, a good amount of time they had. Sort of every meeting had purpose. So I provided them with this reverse mentoring handbook. And every time that they had a meeting, there were key things that they needed to explore and discuss, each meeting was scaffolded so there was an icebreaker activity, there was discussion, there were activities within the discussion, and then there was a sort of de ice breaker, and if that's what you would call it, but something else to kind of wind them down at the end of the conversation, then they had some reflection to do as as individuals. So acknowledging that this was a research project and as such, it was, it was quite time intensive for the participants. It was clear that it made all of them reflect on, how am I possibly supposed to build a relationship like this with the staff that I see, or with the students who are actually my personal duties, if I only see them for 20 to 30 minutes? Once, you know, once every semester. So I think it gave people a lot of food for thought on that front, but I think it helped people to see that actually when we when we approach our relationships with one another. So this is on both sides, when I see my students as equal partners to me, when my students see me as an equal partner with them, the relationship has has so much more potential than if we view it as something hierarchical. You know, if I regard myself as the fountain of all knowledge, and I'm passing that down to my students, or if they see me as this. I don't know this ever happens, but I know there's maybe some more, more esteemed colleagues that some students you know, will say to me, I'm scared of that person. I can't go to them like he's so intelligent. He knows everything. I can't go and ask him all these stupid questions that I've got when actually, if, if students changed their perception, sometimes of of staff, and staff were willing to put in the work to change that perception of themselves as well. I think personal tutoring has a lot more potential.

Ryan Scheckel  
So you mentioned one of the potential, I would say challenges with reverse mentoring being just trying to subvert perception and expectation. Were there any other difficulties or barriers to adopting a true reverse mentoring relationship in higher education?

Rachael O'Connor  
Yeah, I think the biggest thing just is that to get I think a lot of the work in my experience has been supporting and building up the student mentors to recognize that they. Are experts in this relationship, because it's so easy for them to think, I can't, I can't tell this person anything that they don't already know. But actually they are, you know, 99 times out of 100 they're telling them their mentee something that their mentee does not understand. And I think that is, really, is the challenge. Because if you, if we go back to that example of me as a as a student, being mentored by a senior lawyer, you could really, in that relationship, say that I knew almost nothing about legal practice, so he literally held all the cards, had all the knowledge and the power, whereas in reverse mentoring, you can, you can really stress to the student. You know you are an expert in your in your life. Nobody knows what it means to be you in this context better than anybody else. But you can't take away from the fact that, let's say they are mentoring. You know, I've done projects with the student mentoring the Vice Chancellor of the University. You can't pretend that that Vice Chancellor is somebody who knows nothing about higher education. So that's a really tricky to get the balance, and for people to reach that situation where they both feel like they're giving equally to to the relationship and and sometimes that is never fixed. And you know, I've had, in some of my projects, I've had participants at the end say, you know, I really enjoyed this. I got a lot out of it, students, for example, but they will say I did still feel the like my mentee, the staff member, was probably leading things. So it's not always, you know, I've seen some, I've seen some suggestions in the research that reverse mentoring is a kind of, it's always a win, win situation. It's always is always super positive. It's always successful. And as much as I think it is a fantastic initiative, I kind of disagree with that. I think there are times when it maybe doesn't quite go to plan, and I think that can sometimes leave students feeling quite deflated. So I think a big part of successful reverse mentoring is also what you do after the event. You know, how do you keep the students and the staff involved in what happens next? I think it's, it's easy for reverse mentoring to just end up being nice conversations, but for me, reverse mentoring has always been about enhancing equity, so there has to be something else. The conversations alone are never going to do that. So whether there's something else is holding senior leadership to account for the following 12 months, making them kind of make pledges about what they're going to do off the back of the conversations and monitoring that whether the next steps are okay. Well, we came up with these ideas around personal tutoring. Let's now implement them across the university, kind of as a team after the initiative. But, yeah, I think, I think that those power relations are fundamentally one of the biggest challenges. But I will say, in almost all of the reverse mentoring work I've done, I think students, by the end, I definitely feel much more empowered. And the vast majority of students that I've worked with, the reverse mentoring has been a bit of a catalyst for them to go on, then go on and do something else that's been, whether that's been a leadership role in like a student led society, whether they've applied for a job and they, you know, they've often talked about reverse mentoring in their interviews, or whether they have gone and got involved In further research. That's kind of requires them to bring their lived experience expertise, I think is, is one of it's one of the challenges, but also one of the real benefits, if you create a reverse mentoring situation that allows those students to flourish.

Matt Markin  
So, you know, we've been talking about, a lot of your research has been with the students. Have you seen it come into play with staff and administrators or supervisors amongst like an advising unit or department?

Rachael O'Connor  
Yes, so I think the reverse mentoring schemes that I've led, or kind of been involved in, as I said, there was the fellowship project that involved staff who in leadership roles for personal tutoring. But I've also done projects, projects with university leadership, but also projects with that have involved staff who, I guess, are much more on the ground, so people who are teaching students, who are personal tutors, who are working in kind of professional services, student support roles. And I did, it's something I'm kind of writing up currently. Actually, I did an interesting thing recently where I went back to the staff participants from my first ever reverse mentoring scheme, which was about five years ago, and I interviewed them again to see had the experience stuck with them, essentially, like, what difference had it made, if Any, to their practice? Because a lot of the reverse mentoring research that's out there, including my own, makes claims about, you know, the benefits of reverse mentoring and how it, you know, the enhancements that it makes the staff practice and that kind of thing. But that's kind of okay to say right at the end of a project, when everyone's feeling really motivated and like, yeah, that was great, and I'm going to do this, and I'm committed to doing this, but actually, in the long term, do people do any of those things? And if they don't, it's often not because they don't want to. It's often because then life happens and they just haven't had time. So it was really interesting to go back to those participants, and they all talked about in they use different language, but they all talked about this idea of the experience of getting that really personalized, in depth, sort of longer term connection with the student over a whole year and through that sort of iterative engagement that they just didn't have the opportunity to have with any of the students, how that had kind of almost seeped into their consciousness As a practitioner, and they kind of recalled instances where they've been in a scenario with another student, and they brought their reverse mentor to mind, and kind of thought, okay, yeah, this is, this actually is. It's different, but it's connected to what we talked about when we were exploring this, you know, aspect of identity or something like that, and they've almost used it as a like a compass as to how they then have made future decisions about particular students, or how they behave, or how they set things up in the classroom, or how they scaffold relationships with their personal tutors or maybe their supervisees, for example. So, yeah, I think through the different levels of staff that I've worked with, reverse mentoring has had that like, what you might think is the more impressive impact of like, okay, these, these big things have changed at a policy level, and personal tutoring is probably the biggest example of that. You know, the fact that my, my job as a university lead for personal tutoring intern exists is in part owing to the reverse mentoring work that we've done at the university. But I think some of the most important impacts that it's had on staff are at that ground level of just having more people on campus who are conscious about and care about the diversity of students that we have who are thoughtful and who are caring and who just tick, take them, take a moment of pause and think this person has a very different identity or has a very different background to mine, maybe I should explore that with them, rather than just giving the advice that I think, you know is correct, and I think that really lends itself. You know, I know a lot of universities are working on, or kind of promoting more of a coaching approach to personal tutoring. So, you know, supporting students to come to their own decisions conclusions. You know, through asking those kind of guiding questions and getting them to reflect and kind of build their own perceptions, and I think we're best mentoring really does link nicely with that.

Ryan Scheckel  
I'll be honest, the first thought, thing I thought of about reverse mentoring, as far as benefits, was that certainly students are going to feel differently about themselves. It's good to hear, though, that in a follow up sense, you know, some of the reverse mentoring dynamics have seeped in and become practice for personal tutors and academic staff. But speaking of things that you're doing more recently, I am curious about your recent work on the intersectional identities of working class students in higher ed. Certainly, we've discussed your background, but I'm kind of curious to explore or unpack that conceptually for our listeners a little bit, because I know everybody who is in an advising or personal tutoring role of some sort, whether primary role or otherwise, recognizes that there are gaps that people might be falling into, and I'm curious if that's been your experience.

Rachael O'Connor  
Thank you. Yeah, I would start by saying my my focus in my research around intersectionality absolutely stems from reverse mentoring, because the first ever study I did in around 2020 was with international students, so I used reverse mentoring, again as a sort of vehicle for international students as mentors to staff to explore how in the law School we could better support and empower international students. So the criteria for a student coming forward to be a mentor was that they had to be an international student. And I, again, naively, maybe at the time, didn't think there was any issue with, you know, they are international students. That's That's their label, that's who they are, and by working with these, it was just eight students, they completely transformed my perception of what it means to be an international student, and I began to realize the problems with putting labels on people, putting people into singular boxes. You know, this is what you are, therefore you need this support. This is what you are, therefore you need this support. Because those students, actually, by chance, all happen to be women. They all happen to be women of color. They they talked about a whole range of different things, sexuality, faith, class, identity, and the what they brought to the project as mentors was so much more than being just about their nationality and the fact that they were studying in The UK, and had come from different countries, so that's been my driver for everything I've done after that has even if it's focused on particular things like class, identity, I I'm always thinking about through an intersectional lens, and I think that's really critical to personal tutoring as well. The project that I've published most recently is looking at imposterism, or people might often refer to as imposter syndrome, in working class students. And it was interesting in that study, there is, I think, a perception, at least in the UK, that if you are somebody who is working class, then you are a student from the UK. There is an assumption that international students cannot be working class. You know, people, people make assumptions that working class students are very wealthy. Yeah, come from very kind of privileged backgrounds. And you know, as much as that can be the case for anyone, that can be the case for international students, but it also apps, is not the case for everybody. And I've been really pleased in some of the research that I've done that, I have had international students who identify as working class who are maybe studying in the UK on scholarships and that kind of thing coming to take part in this research, because I think they they provide a very different perspective on working class experience. You know students who, for example, are studying, you know, my job, my geography, isn't great, but pretty much to me, studying on the other side of the world. And you know, they're, they're surrounded by people who spend the summer travel. In Europe, and, you know, doing all these kinds of things, going back and forth all over the world. And the some of these students can't afford to go home once in the whole, you know, two or three years that they're still being in the UK, because the flights, you know, are so prohibitively expensive. And the kind of impact that that has on students, many of whom are kind of studying away from home for the very first time and are dealing with the challenges of, for example, in the UK, only being able to work in a paid job a certain number of hours because of visa restrictions. And you know how, you know how they're kind of surviving that alongside, you know, trying to thrive in their studies. And have, you know, the best time ever, kind of studying in a different country. So, yeah, they've made a really important contribution to that work. And I think, yeah, I think it's a really important thing for personal tutors, for academic advisors to reflect on. Because I think, of course, there are things that are helpful to particular students. So let's take international students as an example. You know, things that are offered in terms of support around visas and that, and that sort of thing. And how do you, as someone who is new to a country, how do you open a bank account, or how do you do this and that those things are, of course, going to be specifically useful to international students, but I think we do run into problems where people want an answer of, how do I how do I become a good personal tutor to this group of students or that group of students? And I think often the answer is, you just become a good personal tutor. I think if you are, if you are an informed and by that, I mean you do your training, you do your reading, you do your research. You're an informed, you're a caring and you're an authentic personal tutor or academic advisor. I really believe that we should be able to support any student, whether they are from a background that is very much like our own, or whether they're from a background that's completely alien to us, completely different to what we know and understand. Because if we take that partnership approach, then inevitably there's that mutual learning. And I talk a lot about reverse mentoring, but there's so much reciprocity in reverse mentoring as there should be in good personal tutoring.

Matt Markin  
That's a great way to circle back on that. And this is such a fascinating discussion and a lot of tidbits that you were able to give listeners, and I'm so glad that we were able to connect and have this discussion today. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. 

Rachael O'Connor  
No, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the great questions.