 My name is Adrian Johnson and I'm Director of Publications here at the Royal United Services Institute. And we're in the Rusey Library, which is a very interesting place. Some of the great defence and security thinkers have done their work here. So for example, Basil Little Heart did a lot of research here in the interwar period. The great irony being that actually rather than the British using his theories of armoured warfare, it was the Germans who then adopted it. Rusey is a apolitical institution, so it's strictly non-partisan. And what it tries to do is inform the public and policy debate over defence and security policy in the UK, but also more globally. In my role of Director of Publications, I work on things like the Rusey Journal, which is one of the world's leading journals on defence and security and is read worldwide. We also do books and other monographs. And we also do briefing papers and other occasional papers, which are smaller publications that are designed to have an immediate policy impact on the great questions of the day. After my undergraduate degree, I went to King's College War Studies to do an MA in Conflict Security and Development, which I found to be an incredibly useful degree. Not only do I use the subject matter knowledge that I picked up, so the links between development and conflict, the nature of civil war and international efforts to build peace. Perhaps most important was the spirit of critical inquiry that you learn to undertake while doing a degree. So the idea that one very useful thing I learnt was to embrace uncertainty, that the more you know about a topic, actually the more you realise how much more there is still to know. But nevertheless being confident in coming to measured conclusions, which is such useful skill to have in a policy environment. I had a pretty good relationship actually with the three professors I had at King's. So Professor Mats Badal, Professor Jack Spence and Peter Bush. I keep in touch with them all today. And actually one thing I really liked about King's was that you would have seminars with the professors, with the CD members of staff, so you weren't sort of palmed off with some TA. You actually got the world experts in the field, probing you, challenging you, but also teaching you a lot. What struck me very quickly when I arrived at King's was how motivated and how talented everyone was. We'd all come from different backgrounds. In my first lecture to my right was someone who'd come straight from their BA like I had, but to my left was someone with 20, 30 years of genetic experience. So this variety you had in your seminars meant that you had a variety of perspectives, experiences and also different kinds of knowledge so people knew about different areas often from first hand experience. And since then I've kept in touch with a lot of friends from King's. They've all gone to great and good things. One of them has worked for the UN on a mediation. Others work for NGOs doing very interesting work in the field but also national capitals. Some have also gone into the private sector so it's a really good network to know. I'd certainly do it again because there's so much to learn. My only regret was that I couldn't do more modules because so many of them were difficult to choose the ones I did. And while I have no regrets that I went for diplomacy reporting wars and my core modules obviously, there were so many other interesting choices. I'd love to go back and give those a go. I was very fortunate to have the world expert on my topic as my supervisor. So I did a dissertation on the disarmament demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants after Civil War and Professor Mats Badal was my supervisor. Aside from the quality of the course and the teaching, the fact that you're in the middle of London means you have a tremendously good proximity to loads of policy-relevant institutions, whether it be the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, DFID, but also think tanks like Rusey, Chatham House and the IISS. I think a degree from Kings, the more you put into it, the more you get out. And I think what I learnt was that you worked very hard. The expectations of the students are very high but the facilities were brilliant. The more libraries probably one of the best I've ever been to in the world. And you're challenged, you're tested. But I think you learn to develop a sort of self-confidence in your analysis that if you can make it at Kings you can make it anywhere.