 For my doctoral research, I'm exploring higher education students' experiences in the UK, and in particular, I'm trying to critically impact the metaphor of the student as a consumer. By this, I mean that nowadays there is this idea that higher education is a commodity, like any other, and that students are consumers of higher education, so faculty would be the seller of this good. And what I'm trying to do is from an identity studies perspective to find out if this is really how students feel about their own identity. And I think this is particularly important because so far no one has done it. It looks like a simple idea, go to students, speak to them, ask them about these things, but no one has done it. You will find lots of articles, of papers, of studies that explore this idea, but always from the academic point of view. And I thought that it was only fair to give students a voice. What do you really think about the way you are being constructed, portrayed? The reason I'm passionate about this research is because I really believe that higher education is a basic human right, which should be accessible to everyone. But the fact is that we are in the UK in the 21st century, and it is still not accessible. If you come from an underprivileged background, you will not have the same opportunities. And so I think it's really important to explore everything that is connected to higher education, everything that is around it, and try to figure out a way of changing things, of trying to make it something that is really a right, and not just something that is accessible for some, for the privileged ones. There is a longitudinal aspect in my research, so I have spent the last three years, four years actually, interviewing higher education students all over the UK, mainly in England and in Scotland. And I started interviewing middle class students, upper middle class students. And at some moment, I was trying to get access to students coming from less privileged backgrounds, students coming from state schools. And I started, you know, you try this snowball technique. You ask students, do you have any friend that has studied in state schools and no one, no one had friends coming from state schools. And I start to realize that there is this split at uni. And I went, at some moment I found a way to get access to these students. And what I found out is that you have two different realities in the UK. You have students that come from privileged backgrounds and aim for Russell Group universities. They aim for Oxbridge. And they go to uni. They can have a part-time job, which is something they do to support, to have some extra money for partying and to travel. But then you have these other realities. You have students coming from under privileged backgrounds that need to work to support their studies. I think that right now there are lots of assumptions about what higher education students expect from university. But some of those assumptions I found out are not correct. So I hope this study informs higher education leadership to realize that you cannot treat students as a stereotype. There is no single type of student. And so treating students just as mere consumers, assuming that student is buying higher education as you go to McDonald's and buy a burger is not correct. Since now I'm listening to them, I'm trying to give them a voice. I hope that this serves to inform higher education leadership. At least.