SLD Intros: Andrew Struan

Tell us a bit about you and your background:

Elina, Andrew and Stuart pretend it’s the 1940s

My name is Andrew and I’m the Head of Student Learning Development (SLD). I’ve worked in our team for… a number of years. I started here in 2012, and I haven’t left since. I became Head of SLD last year after spending a few years managing one half of the team.

I did my undergrad, my Masters, and my PhD all here at Glasgow. I studied history for each of my degrees. My PhD, which I got in 2010, looks at British politicians during the American Revolution. I looked at a group of politicians and how their knowledge of America just before the American Declaration of Independence guided politics in Britain (tl;dr: it didn’t really).

Since then, my research has swapped focus a little: I now look at political language in the British Parliament. I’m especially interested in how politicians use language to frame ideas, and how these change over time. I’ve looked, for example, at who and what British politicians have called ‘uncivilised’ or ‘barbaric’ (turns out, it’s quite often the Scots).

After finishing my PhD, I became a lecturer in International History and Politics in Ireland. I was then the Gilder-Lehrman Research Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at the University of Virginia in America. I returned to Scotland in 2012 and joined our team. Since then, I’ve worked in various roles: I was the Effective Learning Adviser for the College of Social Sciences, the Effective Writing Adviser for Postgraduate Research Students, the Effective Learning Adviser for the College of Arts.

What is your job and what does it involve?

As Head of Student Learning Development, I get to pretend that I’m in charge. My job used to involve a lot of teaching, but I don’t get to do so much of that any more (and I do miss it). Instead, my work now tends to be around managing the team’s goals and priorities, ensuring that we’re always working towards being the best department of our type in the world, and shouting loudly and at anyone who’ll listen about the brilliance of the rest of the team and their work.  

On top of that, I’m in charge, for example, of running our compulsory course, the Academic Writing Skills Programme (AWSP). I also run our pre-entry course for undergraduate students, called T2G. While my job, mostly, involves a lot of meetings and a lot of emails, I will never complain about getting to work with an excellent team who are so passionate about working with our students to improve their university study. This makes me proud every day. 

What are your favourite aspects of your job and your biggest passion project?

Murdag and Andrew

The favourite part of my job is getting to pull together a project from nothing, putting it into action, and then seeing our students engage with and get to grips with what we’ve done. For T2G, for example, we brought together a full course – which has now been recognised at multiple national-level awards (!) – from nothing within the space of a few months. Going from nothing, through the process of building up an entire course and all the systems and processes and teaching content behind that, was a real joy.

Who gets to create something that hundreds of students then actively show how much they enjoy and love as part of their day-to-day job? It’s great.

My big passion project at the moment is probably around looking at how we make it easier for students to get to grips with developing their skills. It sounds weird to say, but making it easier for our students to be able to take part in things that’ll make them better (at work, at study, in the world) is so important.

If we’ve to say as educators that we want to make a difference in the world, then surely it should be by making our students have the ability to make that difference?

Outwith work, what are your favourite things to do?

My absolutely favourite thing to do is spend time with my pug, Murdag. She is my best friend and my one-true-love. We enjoy all the same tv shows (she doesn’t really get much say in what we watch, to be fair) and we also both enjoy snacks.

Aside from lying lazily on the couch with Murdag, I try to stay active and healthy. I try to gym every day, and I force myself to go to spin classes (and tell myself that I like them). I’m also a pretty big sci-fi nerd; you can generally catch me talking about Star Trek at any given point of the day. Ask me a question about the design of the latest Romulan Warbirds or the current politics of the Cardassian Empire and I will have Strong Opinions.

Murdag being cute

Before you go, what’s your one tip for succeeding in study/university/research/the workplace?

This is easy for me: the biggest tip I have is to engage. Engage with everything the university does and has to offer. I learnt this lesson too late: it wasn’t until my fourth year of undergrad, and then really through my Masters and PhD, that I actually fully engaged with the university, university clubs and societies, university life, and much more of what’s on campus.

We know from research that students who engage with university life do best, but also that they get the most out of their time with us. I know from my own experience that, once I started to engage with everything around me at uni, I grew to love everything UofG (and it’s why I’m still here).

To succeed at university throw yourself into everything you possibly can, even if it makes you uncomfortable to begin with. Doing this turned me from the shy, quiet, reserved kid that I had been in school to someone who loves their subject, loves the uni, and loves what we all do.

Written by Dr Andrew Struan, Head of SLD