Rachel Fogg

A degree in Modern and Medieval Languages has led Rachel Fogg into a varied career as well as time spent raising a family. Rachel is the Divisional Administrator for the Information Engineering Division, Department of Engineering and PA to the Head of Division.

I was absolutely certain that I wasn’t going to be a stay-at-home mother; I was going to be a modern woman and go back to work.

Then financial reality hit and I realised that my salary might just about cover childcare for one child, but not three. I decided that if anybody was going to make a mess of bringing up my children, it might as well be me! It meant I had to radically change my mind about what I thought I was going to do.

Success is about working in a way that fulfils the potential you have. I’m a linguist with a degree from Cambridge, and I could have had a career somewhere like the civil service. But I’ve looked to fulfil my potential in other ways.

“Success is about working in a way that fulfils the potential you have.”

It’s not necessarily about getting to the top of the tree; it’s about using your gifts and aptitudes as best you can in various different environments. For example, I live in a small community and found my place in it by working out how best I could contribute. I became Chair of the School Governors, still run a Brownie group and am part of the choir. I don’t want to come across as too pious; I get involved in things that might be seen as worthy, but I do them because they are thoroughly enjoyable and I love being part of something.

Sooner or later in many working partnerships, one of you will have to compromise what you do in order to allow the other to progress professionally. When the children were small my husband had a series of demanding jobs, which meant he had to travel a lot. That can be difficult for both sides of the partnership. For the person left at home with three small children, there’s a tonne of stuff to do and you feel under pressure. The flipside was that he missed lots of opportunities to engage with the children when they were younger. It would have been wonderful if we could have been a bit more flexible about how we shared those things.

This would have been more possible if people recognised that efficiency doesn’t have to mean working long hours. From a management point of view, it shouldn’t matter if people need to work flexibly as long as the work gets done and nobody else is inconvenienced. Changing this sort of perception would have significant implications for women with children, not least because in my experience they’re often the ones who make most efficient use of their time. At home they’re always doing six things at once, so they just bring that attitude into the workplace.

Anybody who’s spent a long time out of the paid workforce, whether male or female, finds it very difficult to come back. I can remember being petrified about returning to work. I’d run my home, been heavily involved in the local school and had a strong sense of my contribution to the village. But you worry it doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to what will be valued in the workplace. There is no benchmark to tell you whether you will be more or less skilled than someone else. I ended up taking myself off to get some computer skills and built my confidence through a series of temporary roles that eased me back into the workplace.

I genuinely love coming to work here every day. Engineering is a fascinating place with people working on everything from wind tunnels and jet engines to medical imaging techniques. I get most satisfaction from my working relationships. The academics, postdocs, PhD students and administration team are my people and I care about them. I try to help out with whatever they need at the time and ‘yes’ tends to be my default response to most requests.

I also tend to remember if someone is about to have a baby, submit their thesis or have just got engaged. For me it’s about dealing with them as individuals and remembering all the things they have going on in their lives.

“For me it’s about dealing with them as individuals and remembering all the things they have going on in their lives.”

Although I’m very happy doing what I do, it still has to be said that I am not without ambition. I won’t be sitting here forever and I’d quite like to run a small department at some point. In many ways if you’re not moving forward you’re actually falling back.

I’m astounded to have been nominated to take part in a book that looks at successful women in the University. Typically when people think about success, they think of individuals who’ve reached the top in their chosen profession, who are very wealthy, or who have some other amazing attribute. But there do need to be ways of recognising people who are good role models of their type. In status terms I’m fairly low in the pecking order, but I must project what other people feel are positive qualities. The French have an expression, ‘sentir bien dans sa peau’, which means ‘to feel good in your own skin’. Maybe that’s what makes other people think I’m successful, because I patently enjoy what I do.