 Hi everybody and welcome along to another episode of UCAT Conference TV. I'm Column Cronin from the Adventures in Advising podcast and today I am delighted to be joined by Dr Karen Bottom from the University of Birmingham. Karen, how are you doing? Very well, thank you. Great to be here. Well thank you for taking the time to chat to me today and I suppose to give listeners and our viewers as well an opportunity to get to know you a little bit. Can you talk to us about what it is that you do with the University of Birmingham about how you came into work in higher ed and maybe a bit about your work with UCAT as well? Yeah of course, delighted to. So I suppose you could say I took an unusual route into higher education in the sense that I was previously a nurse and I slowly worked my way through my A-levels to go to university and then while at university I realised that I really enjoyed teaching, working with students and research and decided like I think so many people incrementally that my career, my future lay in academia so I then went on to do a PhD and found myself at the University of Birmingham in 2007 and since then I've worked at the Institute of Local Government Studies which is a small department that works around areas of public management and public administration. I'm director of education there and also senior tutor and responsible for personal academic tutoring for post-graduates in the school. Very good. I love hearing about how people kind of come to work in higher ed and there are so many different routes. Some people come kind of directly in but a lot of the time it is that indirect route and that kind of brings a lot of different perspectives which is always good and then I suppose in terms of the UCAT conference and that's taking place as well we're recording this and it will be taking place over the next few days but can you talk to me then I suppose a little bit about the senior tutor's network? Absolutely yeah we're really excited about it so I co-convene it with Anne Bingham from Southampton University and when you it's been set up really to provide a platform for colleagues across different universities to come together to share ideas, share practice but also kind of to give us confidence in what is in many institutions a new role to think about how we might move senior tutoring forward, how we can draw on learning for example during the pandemic that's you know had a massive impact on how we tutor and how we provide academic and personal academic tutoring. It's also an opportunity for us really at the moment to think about the different models across the country how they're developing and we're hoping to bring a repository to the membership that we can use and also you know membership or no membership hopefully will be able to inform institutions across the country on how academic tutoring works but also how it can be kind of managed and overseen and developed because as well as providing academic tutoring for students it's also about how we can provide CPD for staff and support staff who are providing the service to our students. Outstanding I love the the approach and certainly with yourself and Anne Bingham big fan of Anne she does tremendous work so some great people involved and then if there are people watching this who want to kind of get more involved they're really intrigued by this how can they best go about doing that? Well they can first of all you can go on to the UCAT website if you look under the special interest groups you can find both mine and Anne's details there. Similarly you can google me I'm at Birmingham University and you can contact me directly through my work email address I mean we have I think around 25 members now which is kind of really pleasing because we're a new group so and I think that pretty much covers an institution almost for every member which is great so we've got a really good spread across the country so everybody's welcome you don't have to be a senior tutor you don't have to be organising personal academic tutoring it's purely for people who work in that area have aspirations to develop in that area have got aspirations to lead and innovate in that area it's really a platform for anybody who's committed to personal academic and academic tutoring. Absolutely fantastic yeah I definitely encourage any viewers who are interested to reach out get in touch and look to to find out more and for anyone watching this who wants more information on UCAT in general or the UCAT conference you can see some of the the details on screen there the conference hashtag you can also find videos and more information of course on the UCAT website but also across at UCAT social media channels so all that really remains Karen is to say thank you for chatting to me and I want to wish you continued success in your career and with the senior tutor's network Colin thanks very much pleasure to be here