Becoming an Entrepreneur as an Arts Graduate

Carly McNamara graduated with their PhD in Celtic in 2021 and has spent 5 years working as a GTA in the departments of Celtic & Gaelic and History. In 2021 they began working with the University of Glasgow's Student Enterprise team to build a business plan and launch their own business, which they have officially done in 2022. In this blog post Carly discusses their experiences moving into the field of entrepreneurship from the Arts.

I never really envisioned myself as an entrepreneur. That's perhaps a bit odd to say considering my dad has owned and run his own business for longer than I've been alive. I have considered myself a historian, or more specifically a medievalist, for many years now. My PhD is in Celtic, completed in 2021 at the University of Glasgow, with a focus in early medieval Irish and Scottish history. I'm really not what anyone thinks of when they think of an entrepreneur. Now I own and manage my own business, My Academic Family. My organisation is a non-profit that provides support to first-generation university students in the UK by providing opportunities for community online and one-to-one mentorship with someone who has already successfully completed a university degree in the UK.

This started to change for me probably before I was really aware of it. I studied for a Master's in Adult Education, which I completed in 2013. These studies gave me a lot of big opinions on academia in general and university education more specifically. These perspectives and opinions would grow to ultimately become the foundation of my entrepreneurship. 

Throughout my PhD I started to become aware of the precarious nature of academic employment, even though a large part of me wanted dearly to become a professional researcher. I started thinking about other options that were available. 

There are discussions online of 'alt-ac' or 'ac-adjacent' career options. Alt-ac being alternative academic careers (there are books you can buy about this) and ac-adjacent being academic adjacent. These are careers that aren't necessarily in research or teaching, but are still at the university. They might be in administration, professional services, student support, fundraising, grant writing, etc. I even thought about the possibility of going for an information science (or library science) degree and trying to become a subject librarian (note: this is another difficult field for employment prospects). 

I tried to talk to people about alternative career options for a PhD student in my field, but there really wasn’t much information out there for me. I tried to consider what kind of consultation opportunities there might be for game developers, movie and tv show producers, and even writers, but it’s really hard to make a career out of that kind of work. I’m told the fees people charge are extremely low.

Even while trying to pursue an academic future, however, entrepreneurship was creeping up on me. I started thinking about my opinions on education and my desire to help and support my future students to the best of my ability. This was the reason I'd gone for the Master's in Adult Education in the first place. 

I started thinking about the experiences of underserved and under-supported students. I was interacting with them in my GTA role, as well. I had some experience working with non-profits from my pre-PhD days, and also in community organising. This is where the idea of my non-profit really started to become recognisable as a Thing™. I started quietly thinking about what this future non-profit would be like and what it would do. I originally thought it would be something I started up as a side project alongside my work as an academic. This allowed me to take my time in working through it, as it was still a nebulous ‘future project’.

In the meantime, I was nearing the end of my doctoral studies. I was starting to think about postdoctoral opportunities and employment. When I started applying to things I quickly understood that the job market really was precarious and that it really was hard to secure a postdoctoral position. One of the main realisations I’ve had as a researcher is that there are so many good ideas and so many qualified people out there, that even if you are good, you may still not get the opportunity to undertake your research.

It was at this moment that I realised that the opportunity that was right for me was already sitting right there next to me. It was the project I’d been working on slowly for a few years by that point; my non-profit. A friend of mine told me about this Summer Start Up Workshop Programme training programme he participated in with the University of Glasgow’s Student Enterprise programme. He was, like me, a historian trying to figure out how to have a career that let us do something we are interested in and passionate about. I signed up for the programme, which covers topics such as choosing a business model, legal considerations, intellectual property rights, accounting, social media, market research, pitching, branding, product development, and more.

I became aware throughout the course of this programme that I wasn’t the only one in the Arts who was participating in it. I think that in the Arts, unless we are talking about fields such as fine art, theatre, or music, that we don’t often connect our work with the business world. This is perhaps understandable as the way society tends to present entrepreneurs is as business school graduates or engineers. We also tend to think of entrepreneurs as people who engineer new products that need to be built in a warehouse.

Entrepreneurs work on digital products or on services just as much as physical products. Information is a product, as well. I will admit that the service my company provides is in the alt-ac or ac-adjacent field. I’m still working in and around the university environment, but I’ve created my own business. Even more than that, I’ve created what’s called a social enterprise. This means the company has a social or environmental purpose. More specifically, I have started a Community Interest Company (CIC). There’s a lot of scope in the business world for those of us who aren’t necessarily physical product focused. My friend Matthew Leeper’s company, Education Evolved, provides accessible digital learning opportunities to lifelong learners. Another colleague, whom I met during the Summer Start Up Programme, Dr Tawnya Selene Renelle has a business that focuses on creative writing. An additional friend from the Arts side of things, Dr Sally Gales, also has a business that provides services relating to writing skills. We are all recent graduates from Glasgow Uni who are making the move into business.

It's so important that those of us who are in the field of Arts be able to see ourselves in entrepreneurial spaces. We are innovators and we have skills and ideas we can bring into the business world. For me, it’s applying my background in mentoring and being a first-generation university student for the benefit of future first-generation university students.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash