Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
TEBI podcast 42: Alex Davis on life planning, universities, and everything!
504 Plays1 year ago
In the second of a series of 12 TEBI episodes looking at meaning and money during later careers or second lives, Jonathan Hollow interviews doctoral student (and student ambassador) Alex Davis. She talks about her previous career as a finance director, and how she made a challenging transition, after more than 20 years, from running a family business to becoming an expert on the Roman poet Ovid. She also talks about her part-time work as an outreach ambassador for the University of Kent, which gives her the chance to encourage students of all backgrounds to make the leap from school to university.
This podcast series has been developed with financial planning firm Mulberry Bow. Based in London, they offer a highly personalised service to around 150 individuals and families. Robin Powell and Jonathan Hollow are very grateful for their enthusiastic support for "Second Lives”.
Episode transcript: https://www.evidenceinvestor.com/how-to-follow-your-dreams-in-your-40s/ --
Links to key mentions in this podcast:
The University of Kent’s Classics and Archaeology Department: https://www.kent.ac.uk/classics-archaeology --
Ovid’s poem “Ibis” at Loeb Classics: https://www.loebclassics.com/view/ovid-ibis/1929/pb_LCL232.237.xml?result=6&rskey=LoQH7S --
Mulberry Bow financial planners: https://mulberrybow.com/ --
How To Fund The Life You Want: http://tinyurl.com/how2fund --
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Award-Winning Book
00:00:03
Speaker
I'm Jonathan Hollow, and together with Robin Powell, I published a book last year called How to Fund the Life You Want. It's now an award-winning book. In May 2023, it won the Work and Life category of the Business Book Awards. And this podcast series is also about work and life. What is the right balance between the two?
00:00:24
Speaker
How could people make a turn towards life satisfaction, especially in the second half of their lives?
Pursuing Ancient History at University
00:00:30
Speaker
And what about money, the glue that's required to keep it all together? My own second life after full-time work involves studying ancient history at the University of Kent. And my guest this week is also a student there, but she is much more than that.
00:00:47
Speaker
Alex Davis has moved through the course of her forties from being a finance director in a highly successful family business to a doctoral student studying the poetry of the Roman poet Ovid. She also spends a good deal of her time mentoring and encouraging others at the University of Kent. After all, as she says, if she can make the move, having pursued a completely different career for 20 years,
00:01:13
Speaker
What's to stop a teenager in any school making their choice and making it happen?
Collaboration with Mulberry Bow
00:01:20
Speaker
But just before we roll this interview with Alex, I'd like to say a word about Mulberry Bow. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with them.
00:01:30
Speaker
They are a chartered financial planning boutique in the City of London that offers a highly personalized service to around 150 individuals and families. Robin Powell and I like the fact that the team at Mulberry Bow do not have sales targets nor their own financial products to sell. As they like to say, they sit on your side of the table.
00:01:52
Speaker
For more information, just Google Mulberry Bow Wealth Planning or follow the links in the notes for this podcast. So now to Alex Davis.
Studying Ovid’s Exile Poetry
00:02:04
Speaker
Alex Davis, welcome to the show. Thank you very much and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Now, a lot of your life at the moment is about Ovid.
00:02:14
Speaker
Who was Ovid? Ovid was a Roman poet, he was contemporary with the first emperor Augustus and he was a major part of the imperial regime, feeding into that idea of of empires, glorious. Unfortunately we don't know what he did but he upset Augustus and he was exiled to what's now Constantinople in Romania in 8 CE and he never saw Rome again, he wasn't allowed to return.
00:02:44
Speaker
And unfortunately he died there 10 years later and I'm working on the exile poetry that he sent back while he was there. And what are you trying to find out about Ovid through his exile poetry? I'm doing my own philological analysis of it, my own translation, not to produce a beautiful English translation, but in order to really understand how he was constructing the lines of poetry and what it is he was doing and the specifics of the grammar and the
00:03:13
Speaker
and the vocabulary that he was using because published translations are simply designed to make the poetry beautiful in English. They are not designed to be grammatically true necessarily to the sentence. You can pick it up and read it and translate it rather than reading a published translation. Yes, there are published translations for of its exile poetry, 7,300 lines of it.
00:03:42
Speaker
And what I'm looking at is the quite stark differences between Ovid's work pre-exile and post-exile. He uses totally different themes and ideas post-exile. And my thesis is that he's using the exile poetry to recover and also to cement his reputation both in his own present and for all time because he's in trouble with the imperial
00:04:12
Speaker
house that could have left him with all his poetry being banned and burned as one of his poems was. So he wants to be sure that his name and his reputation last and he was successful. It's clear from the poetry that he never expected to return from exile because he never actually asks to come back.
From Family Business to Academia
00:04:36
Speaker
I'd love you to pick up two or three lines of Ovid and read them out to us. Give us a view on some of the things that attract you about his language. One of the three works that he sent back from exile is called Ibis and it's modelled on a Greek curse poem and it's 644 lines of vicious invective. And so most of it is gloriously conducted insults.
00:05:02
Speaker
So, for example, I have three lines here which I particularly enjoy. And may night be worse for you than day, and day worse than night. May you always be pitiful, but may no one pity you. And may men and women rejoice at your troubles. Every day, every night gets worse and worse and worse. So this is very much an idea of once Ovid has cursed you, whoever it is he's cursing is never escaping.
00:05:33
Speaker
I want to return to Latin and what it's like to learn Latin and to become an expert in Latin later in the interview. But for now, we'll go backwards in time a bit. To say the least, it wasn't inevitable that you would end up learning and teaching Latin poetry. It all started or rather it didn't start with a family business.
00:05:58
Speaker
I didn't particularly enjoy school. I was a reasonable student, and I wanted to do well, but certainly my secondary school wasn't as encouraging as one would have hoped at that time. We're dealing with a slightly different world. This was 1992. There were no student ambassadors. It was very hard to get a handle on exactly what university was like, and I didn't know anyone else who'd gone.
00:06:25
Speaker
So it was a really closed book to me. So I decided it wasn't for me. There seemed to be no redeeming features for it at that point. And because there was a family business, I guess there was a pressure or an expectation that that would be a place for you to go. By the time I left school, my parents' business had grown. We had about 10 or 11 employees, I think, at that point.
00:06:53
Speaker
Both my brother and I had spent a lot of time as kids, kind of doing some work in the holidays and helping out. We cleaned the buildings for years every evening. That gave us a bit of an income, but it also gave us a really good idea of what was going on and how the business worked. I don't know whether it was an expectation that we would go in, but at the time I was finishing my A-levels, my mother's parents were getting quite elderly. They needed a bit more help.
00:07:21
Speaker
And so my mum stepped back, she was company secretary and accountant, and I learned the job of accounts assistant at that point whilst doing it. And I also attended college in Dover evening release to study accountancy as a formal qualification as an NVQ. Were there any other ambitions or expectations sort of in the air? I think eventually the expectation became that
00:07:51
Speaker
both my brother and I, he's a salesman and an engineer, that we would take over a lot more responsibility as my parents and our technical director Richard stepped back as time went on. So it was a gradual thing. My parents were also getting much older. They wanted to retire completely, which is quite understandable. Who wouldn't?
00:08:16
Speaker
They came in and said, right, we need to have a director's meeting. The four of us sat down. My dad said, I think it's time we solved this. This is the reason why. And I burst into tears. Life was very much very stable. We had good income. We were successful. Everything was going very smoothly. And all of a sudden, Wallop, ah, now Wallop.
00:08:43
Speaker
This is Jonathan Hollow and you're listening to Second Lives. I'm interviewing Alex Davis, a student of Latin poetry and an enthusiast for second, third and fourth chances in education.
00:08:56
Speaker
The business was then sold and I think you did some additional consultancy work for it for a while. But one day it was behind you. This thing that had occupied so much of your life for all your career really was not there anymore. So I mean, tell us about how you felt after you'd had that longer period to process the change.
00:09:24
Speaker
We worked very, very hard to sell it to the right people. And in the 18 months, I had a chance to think, OK, what am I going to do now? I've always worked effectively in a management position, even though I wasn't technically in management when I started. What's that going to be like? Do I want to work for somebody else in this business? Do I want to see somebody making changes to it?
00:09:51
Speaker
and have to fight all the time to go, no, I don't think that's ever, no, it's not my responsibility anymore. Personally, I'd also met my partner, Owen, and he is a senior lecturer at Kent. And so I knew a lot more about university than I had done before.
Navigating Career and Education Pathways
00:10:12
Speaker
I visited the campus a few times, come to the theater and things like that.
00:10:16
Speaker
So I knew it was a beautiful place to be, and I'd started to think, well, maybe I'll do this now. Maybe I'll go to university. I'll invest a bit of the money we're going to get for our shares and actually go. And with a bit of advice from his colleague who's an admissions officer for university, I discovered an adult learning qualification called Access to Higher Education Diploma, and
00:10:42
Speaker
I'd registered for that and by the time we actually sold it and did some consultancy and I stepped back as the new owners wanted, I was really excited about making that change. And what was then your route between then and starting to study at the University of Kent? So I took this access to higher education diploma which is a level 3 qualification equivalent to 3A levels.
00:11:11
Speaker
And I took that full time at Canterbury College for a year. That gave me the qualifications I needed to apply to university and a lot of support and help in that university application process, not least of which coming from the university themselves, which is where I first met the lady who I, one of the ladies I now work for in our outreach team. And I started at University of Kent in September 2016,
00:11:40
Speaker
as a full-time undergraduate in classical studies. We're going to delve a bit more into your working world at the University of Kent as well as your world of study, but I just have a couple of questions about money. As I understand it at the moment, you're earning not very much money, an amount that many people might find it difficult to live on, but you obviously have a very fulfilling life. I'm just curious about your present relationship to money
00:12:09
Speaker
If you don't need money to live on, are there other reasons why you need it? Do you need it for validation? Would you do what you currently do for no money at all? I mean, look, I think that the first thing to do is deal with the fact that I am in a very lucky position. We were paid for our shares. I was paid good money for consultancy for three months and I was paid effectively to go away. My partner works full time, so we were
00:12:39
Speaker
we were placed in a lucky position. Would I do outreach work for the fun of it? Yes, I would, but please don't tell the outreach department. But it's important to have an income, I think, and important to have that idea of a job. And if you're working, everybody should be paid for the job that they do. That's important. And as students in particular,
00:13:08
Speaker
Having a stable income which also fits in with one's timetable and everything is so important which is why working for the university makes so much sense because that's an employer who understands you also have a degree. You were obviously earning a much higher salary before and to some extent a high salary can be a bit of a trap
00:13:33
Speaker
I mean, if there are people listening to this and thinking, gosh, you know, I'm not sure I could kind of leap off this this shelf into a new life. I mean, have you got any thoughts or reflections from your own experience that would be relevant to those people? I think it's easy to look back and say, yes, it was time to make a change. I've been in that business for 22 years full time and a lot longer than that, you know, in bits as a kid. So but it was
00:14:03
Speaker
It's sometimes easy to not see any further than what we're going to do next week, what we're going to do today, and what the job has for us. But I think I'm the personification of it's never too late. I am a trained financial accountant, and now I study Latin poetry. And this is not the 1800s anymore. We're not living in a Dickens novel. If you become a lawyer at 17, you don't have to still be a lawyer when you're 17.
00:14:31
Speaker
If you decide for whatever reason that this world doesn't agree with you, well go and do something else. Life's too short to stay doing something that doesn't necessarily make you happy, even if you are earning a small fortune doing it. Looking back, I probably should have made a break earlier than that.
00:14:56
Speaker
Now for a word from Mulberry Bowe who have collaborated with us to develop this series. I spoke to Simon Bullock, their founder. Some of the guests in this series have realised that they needed to move on from a previous life plan or a financial plan or both. I asked him how the firm helps them do this. I think sometimes
00:15:18
Speaker
Being a trusted advisor is about telling truth to power, Jonathan, and not shying away from difficult conversations. I mean, one such conversation can come from a client outgrowing a previous approach, say, to their career or their finances. Accepting that, letting go, can be a bit painful psychologically and without getting too Oprah on you.
00:15:42
Speaker
A bit of discomfort in those situations is really often a sign that there's an improving relationship with your money or with your life plan. I listened to an interview recently with the former CEO of IBM and she said that growth and comfort never co-exist. I think she's probably onto something with that.
00:16:02
Speaker
Thank you. That was Simon Bullock, the founder of Mulberry Bow. And now back to Alex Davis and my interview with her about a second life at university.
Applying Business Skills in Academia
00:16:15
Speaker
You touched on this a little bit earlier, but I'd love you to expand on it about the skills that you brought from running a business and being in the world of business to being a student and a doctoral student.
00:16:29
Speaker
As you know, we have deadlines for our assignments, we have preparatory work to do for our classes, and particularly as a PhD student, there's no timetable. You have to motivate yourself to get that work done because it matters and because you've committed to do it. So I've not had a problem with organising my time, making sure I've got a to-do list, making sure I know what's coming up ahead of me. I've not missed a deadline. I've not missed a class.
00:16:58
Speaker
simply because I spent 20 odd years working with organisations who didn't have any wiggle room with deadline. So you learn that stuff and you can't run a business without it. You can't run a business without keeping all the balls in the air, as it were, and by sometimes being well outside your comfort zone. And bringing those skills to university meant that I didn't have to learn them.
00:17:26
Speaker
About half your time is on your studies, I believe, and about half is broadly outreach work. You're clearly very enthusiastic about it in its own right and probably because of your own personal experiences with it. Yes, without question. I know how much it helped me along with visit days to the university orientating ourselves, getting sample lectures, sample seminars, talks about how it worked.
00:17:55
Speaker
all of which enabled me to arrive here feeling confident. So what we're doing is demystifying the process, dragging the ivory towers down a little bit and saying, look, this is what university's like. This is how you apply. This is what it's good for. This is how cool it is. This is why it's different to school. This is how it's the same as school or college. And what we're saying is, if you want to go, great.
00:18:25
Speaker
We're not selling our education. We're certainly not selling the University of Kent. I've seen one sentence either from myself or one of my colleagues change the way a student looks and they suddenly, they get that it's their choice. They can do what they like. Their path through their lives is not set by what the school won or maybe what the parents won or whoever in their lives won. They don't have to do what their mates are going to do, whatever.
00:18:55
Speaker
They get to choose. The whole planet opens out in front of them. The systems are in place. So we enable students, basically, to make the right choice for them at that point. And also say to them, look, even if you make a choice now and you go down this path, if it isn't till his time or 10 years time or 20 years time, you change your mind and think, actually, no, I want to do something else. Well, they've got to do something else. But it is just astonishing to watch it happen in real
00:19:26
Speaker
in real time. And does it ever take you outside your comfort zone? I remember arriving at school to give a talk to some parents for a sick form open evening and the member staff who I was going to, who was meeting at school, she said to me, oh great, good, glad you're here, that's lovely. I've got about 200 parents and students, so not too, too big an audience there, that's alright, isn't it?
00:19:55
Speaker
And inside I'm shrieking, but I'm wearing the University of Kent's t-shirt. So on the outside, I'm like, yeah, that's absolutely fine, no problems at all. Then they put us all on the stage and then they said, obviously it's Alex, she's in the University of Kent, she's going to talk to you about that. And I got up and I walked across the stage to the lectern and I took a deep breath and I gave a talk, massively outside my comfort zone. But sometimes you give a talk and you talk to one particular student and you think,
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, you'd be great. And I've said to students, you should come. If you come to Ken, sign up to be an ambassador. You'd be a fantastic ambassador. You're going to make a great student. Go for it. Best of luck. And you arrive at the training for the new ambassadors and somebody taps you on the shoulder and you turn around and there's that student. And then now a fellow ambassador, they're a student. And they say, you're the reason I'm here. You're the reason I'm an ambassador.
00:20:53
Speaker
I can never find words to explain what that's like but it makes me tearful in a happy way again that I've made a difference. So the times at which I'm thinking oh goodness 200 people are vastly outweighed by the times I go yes I love this job. That sounds like the most amazing what I would call
00:21:15
Speaker
Outer life. I'd like now to turn back to your kind of inner life and your study and just probe that a little bit more.
Latin Language's Modern Influence
00:21:26
Speaker
I mean, Latin itself, so much of it is hugely important to our history and civilisation. Can you give me a few impressions about learning this strange language? Latin functions, as you know, very differently to how English functions, the endings of the words change
00:21:45
Speaker
according to the function of the word in the sentence. The sentence Alex eats cake can be written in Latin as cake Alex eats and it doesn't matter because the ending of the words are changing according to whether they're subject, object, whatever. So it can be quite mathematical really in trying to decode it. You see how many words are from those Latin words and indeed in French, in Spanish and in particularly Italian.
00:22:15
Speaker
how much of a debt our language and those other romance languages, those other European languages owe to the Romans and to Latin and Latin leans on Greek in a lot of places as well. So it's so much more than a dead language because in a very real sense it's not dead because we're speaking it all the time.
00:22:37
Speaker
This is Jonathan Hollow and you're listening to Second Lives. I'm interviewing Alex Davis about life planning, university and everything. I'm interested in the contrast between when you were working for the family business, I suppose in many ways the business was the thing and you were serving it, you were helping it to function.
00:23:00
Speaker
But now you're Alex Davis, the scholar, and your opinions are the thing. You know, you are becoming an expert on Ovid and people want to know what you think. So it's a very different framing of you and the ego, I suppose. So I'm just curious, do you feel like you are a different person, you're becoming a different person? Yes, I am different since I've been a student.
00:23:31
Speaker
because, as you say, I have much more agency over the way my life unfolds now. Not that I regret the time I spent in the business, not at all. It's immensely valuable, it's lots of fun, and it's a time I look back on with gratefulness, and it was certainly extremely valuable in what I do now. But now I decide, I decide which jobs I apply for, I decide what my angle is on of its poetry, I decide what I'm going to do every day.
00:24:00
Speaker
and we're going to be on campus. Am I not? Am I going to work on my PhD? Am I going to be out of this just in society? I'm the student rep for the postgraduate research students in classics. So that involves a lot of meetings and engagements with students and talking to them and passing on and representing them at the university level. And all of these things are really fulfilling. And I know all this might sound a little bit like, oh my gosh, she thinks everything's great.
00:24:29
Speaker
Do you know what I do? I've had the chance to show you what I want to study when I made the choice to stay for master's. I made the choice to stay for PhD. I discovered a career that I didn't know existed until I started at Canterbury College. I didn't know outreach was a thing. And indeed, when I did my own, it wasn't a thing. There wasn't that ability for anybody to do that work. That work didn't exist to the best of my knowledge.
00:24:59
Speaker
I've made those choices, I've made deliberate choices, and that makes my world much happier.
Impactful Outreach Work
00:25:05
Speaker
My voice is appreciated and recognised. Just on Friday I had the lovely news that I've been shortlisted for an award from a National Education Opportunities Network, NEON, the university's outreach department,
00:25:26
Speaker
submitted a nomination for me as the National Student of the Year Award and I have been shortlisted for it. You clearly love being part of an academic community and I mean at all levels you know you're part of the faculty all the way to people who aren't even students at the university yet so I'm interested in
00:25:53
Speaker
the pleasures and the satisfactions of that maybe you could say describe that a little and then contrast that with what the kind of core part of your study which is alone with books at a desk which has its own pleasures I guess. I find with research that some of the best ideas I have come after I write some things and I get up and I walk away and
00:26:24
Speaker
Go and meet some friends for a cup of coffee or go and give a talk over in one of the other buildings or something to some students from a local school. And I'm walking back from that to my office and suddenly that lightning bolt of research hits your head and you go, ah, that's a really good way to think about it. That's the point. That's what he's doing. That's how I've been thinking about that. Oh, that was an interesting word. So I need that time away from it.
00:26:53
Speaker
chat to other people to find out about what they're interested in, to engage with that community on campus and indeed off in other places, as well as having that time to work. That's one of the reasons my PhD is part time, because then I've got time to devote to other things. And also that separation to not feel like I have to work on it all day every day, that I can afford to do things that make me happy.
00:27:20
Speaker
as well and bring in some money, but also to have time to devote to it as well. And again, that gives a bit of variety.
Career Flexibility and Ambition
00:27:29
Speaker
A big theme of this series is kind of making plans and changing plans. And I'm just interested in your thinking about this, particularly when you're mentoring young people and encouraging them to apply to university or maybe to make an active choice not to go to university.
00:27:48
Speaker
Are you encouraging them to have a career plan or a life plan? I think it's not really either. What it's really about is each qualification you do in an education system or each choice you make in your life is a stepping stone to the next one. If you don't know what your path is,
00:28:13
Speaker
And that's fine. I didn't. I didn't decide what I wanted to do when I grew up until I was about 43 years old. And I want to do outreach. I want to carry on and do that. But when you're that age, most people don't know what they want to do. So at that point, make the right choice now. Choose GCSEs you're good at and that you enjoy and that are fairly well rounded. And then when you get to the next level,
00:28:41
Speaker
Make your level three qualification decision. Do I do a BTEC? Do I do IB? Do I go to college and do a T level or odd or something multiple practical? Do I stand to A levels? What is it I do? And make those choices and make that a stepping stone to the next thing. So I think it's less of making a career plan or a life plan, but more about inspiring people and saying it's okay not to know there are jobs now which didn't exist 20 years ago.
00:29:09
Speaker
things move quickly, make a choice, see what comes out of it. And maybe while you're studying classics, you'll suddenly discover there's a job over there you didn't know existed that makes you really, really happy. That's what it is you want to do. And when you're doing that outreach, do you think it's part of your role to spur ambition? Yes, absolutely. But ambition doesn't mean the same thing to everybody.
00:29:39
Speaker
It's making it okay for ambition to mean whatever it means to you. And if you want to go on and own a huge, great company, you know, you want to be Steve Jobs, that's brilliant. But actually, if what you want to do is be really happy and enjoy your schooling and enjoy your life and, you know, you don't want to have billions of hours, that's equally fine.
00:30:05
Speaker
And not everybody is the same because it would be original if we were. Thank you. That's been absolutely fascinating, Alex. And thank you for, as ever, wearing your heart on your sleeve. And I'm sure that's part of the reason why you're such a brilliant outreach ambassador. I do hope you get that award. The best thing has already happened that my employer cares enough about the work I do.
00:30:32
Speaker
And one of the reasons is that I've been here for a long time. I've been here for seven years, nearly already. So I've had a chance to build up that body of work, which, you know, if you're only here for three years as an undergrad, you don't even get a chance to do it. But to be nominated is astonishing. To be shortlisted is even more astonishing. That's fantastic. So we're going to go to the House of Commons for the awards ceremony on the 9th of May. And if I get it, one to four, that's great.
00:31:00
Speaker
And if I don't, I'm already happy, so that's alright. So that was Alex Davis. Since we recorded this interview, she won the national award she had been entered for, Neon Student of the Year, for her amazing outreach work on behalf of higher education. I'm sure you'll agree that with her unstoppable enthusiasm for her ambassador work, the award is richly deserved.
00:31:26
Speaker
If you've enjoyed this episode, please bookmark this podcast in your app so that you don't miss the next episode of Second Lives. And I'd like to thank again, Mulberry Bow, the Chartered Financial Planning Boutique in the City of London that has worked with us to develop this series. For more information about them, just Google Mulberry Bow Wealth Planning or follow the links in the notes for this podcast.