Working class academics, when did you first discover ‘academic’ was an actual job that you could potentially do? For me it was during 3rd year undergrad. Based on a lightbulb moment conversation with the person who encouraged me to apply for funding & do postgraduate studies.
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The biggest thing I've noticed is the expectation that most people can just spend another 6 months or a year finishing off their PhD whilst not being paid and be fine financially
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My blood boils.
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I think class is a hard one to talk about; my Dad was a joiner - but am I still working class now? How relevant is it anyway relative to salary which I think has more of an impact on opportunities than a stricter definition of class these days.
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Of course. I think it's harder to talk about because of stigma. My dad was a working class boy who even though passed the 11 plus didn't get to go to grammar school because his parents didn't value education and moved from Sheffield to Bradford and didn't correctly enroll him.
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He married a Cypriot whose parents were second generation American Cypriots from New York who moved back to Cyprus and my parents also moved to Cyprus. Thus my dad can be seen to have escaped the class hierarchy in the UK.
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I'm his daughter who has been living in the UK for 13 years and I'm sick of it all. I am hoping to move back to Cyprus soon, hopefully before 2021. All the time I've been here in the UK upper middle class men from pub schools have told me "you're Cypriot, that means no class".
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Not sure why so many public school wankers in my environment but I try to avoid them now. Although I have to say the ones in academia tend to be better behaved.

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The thing I always notice is how devoid of British regional accents academia is.
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It's shocking to me how hard it is, even if I truly truly wanted to, for me to socialise/make friends with working class people in London. We live in the same city but can barely meet other than for them to fix things for us within a work/transactional environment.
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If fact I know people in London, who work in academia, who have moved in the last 10-5 years who have never heard somebody (consciously) speaking MLE. I mean that's... literally depressing because it means they don't even engage in conversation with anybody outside their bubble.
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It's nobody's fault. It's just a demonstration of how class has such a powerful grip on society here.
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Maybe it depends which university you are looking at. Plenty of working class lecturers in my university (University of Sunderland), though not saying it's class-blind or that the number is proportionate, but maybe because it's an Ex-Poly in a mainly working-class city.
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Well, I was just talking about my personal experiences, in the unis I have been at, so: yes, totally!
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