Philosophy broadens the mind and equips you with lots of analytical tools that can be applied to many different jobs.

What are your main responsibilities?

I am a research fellow working for the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR). I am a quantitative social researcher who focuses on housing, welfare and health policy. I analyse large scale administrative and survey data, including secure government and NHS data. CRESR takes on contract research and projects funded through regulated funding. I also undertake some teaching in the department of Natural and Built Environment.

Briefly outline any previous roles:

Previously worked at the University of Leeds and University of Nottingham as a quantitative researcher working on projects looking at education attainment.

How has your Philosophy degree and your time at the University of Sheffield helped you in your career?

The leap from Philosophy to quantitative social policy may not be immediately obvious. However, my MA has been very useful to me. It gave me an excellent grounding in logic which is essential when dealing with numbers. Being able to form structured, well justified arguments is also useful in my research. I wrote my dissertation on establishing the right to decent housing. This fed into my PhD and fuelled my interest in housing studies.

I also hugely benefited from studying in an intellectually rigorous department. This is the main way my time in the philosophy department has helped me in my career. I left the department with confidence that I could deal with big ideas, and challenge and be challenged on complex theory. Chris Hookway's course on Hegel was brilliant and I knew that if I could read and understand Hegelian dialectics, I could change discipline and learn social statistics.

What career advice would you give to a student interested in studying Philosophy?

Philosophy broadens the mind and equips you with lots of analytical tools that can be applied to many different jobs. It opens the door to a large range of career paths. Your skills will be useful to many roles including policy and intelligence roles.

What argument or view first got you excited about philosophy?

Like many philosophy students I was fascinated by Marxist theory, but studying Rousseau's critique of representative democracy piqued my interest in using philosophy to challenge social norms and structures.