Dr Nathan Ryder

00.04

I'm Nathan Ryder. I describe myself as a freelance skills trainer and consultant and I work for myself. A lot of my time at the minute is spent sort of thinking of and developing short training courses. Since I started on this sort of path it's usually involved doing skills training and workshops for universities and with a special focus on postgraduate researchers.

00.31

I became self employed at the end of my PhD and I decided to go on this path because of lots of different things that people had told me, they told me that I'd be good in this area it wasn't any one thing, I guess it was just a lot of things that came together that sparked that idea.

00.49

My PhD was in maths, in particular in an area of pure maths called Knot Theory. When I finished my Masters I realised I wasn't finished with education and I thought that ... like what little I knew at the time I know it was a good enough base to actually do some research on and contribute something new.

01.11

It think it's given me patience for one thing. I don't know whether that's exactly a transferable skill but I think it's a, it's something that's very important but also, it's given me a sort of good appreciation for research and what's involved.

01.28

I think if an employer sort of sees somebody's CV and sees PhD you're, they, they know that this person's achieved something, they know that they're getting somebody who has put in a lot of work towards it.

01.46

The decision to go down this path was based on a friend. A friend and I sat down late summer 2008 just as I was finishing my PhD and we both - because he worked abroad and because I'd spent the last year sort of writing and correcting and so on - we both said, we need a holiday, next summer we should get away, and over sort of half an hour in the pub this snowballed from a two week let's go, let's do this to five week, to a five week road trip across America which we did last July and early August.

02.26

And at that point when we decided to do that I'd been applying for teaching fellowships and temporary lectureships and things like that because it seemed like the thing that I should do. And, actually I didn't get, I got one reply actually from out of I think nine or ten applications, and so after doing that for the, in the first part of the year and then stopping to focus on completing my thesis, the Viva and corrections, then deciding to travel I sort of thought, well what do I do?

03.05

And so I decided to do this, I said to do it in the first instance as a way of hopefully finding work between September 2008 and summer 2009. And to see if I enjoyed it and if I could, you know, at the basic level earn a living doing it. I earned and did enough to know that I liked it, that I liked the kind of work that I was doing.

03.30

I went and spoke to the Director of Postgraduate Training at Liverpool and said, ‘this is what I'm going to do, can you put me in contact with anybody who might be able to offer me some work? Have you got any work that you can offer me? Is there any workshops, are there any different things, can I come in and sit on people's courses while they're giving them so that I can observe things and learn more?', and they were very, very helpful in giving me you know my first break and my first sort of steps.