One of the greatest pleasures for an academic of a certain age must surely be meeting up with research students he or she has supervised from some years ago and hearing about what they have been doing. There is perhaps inevitably a little bit of pride there in feeling (or perhaps hoping) that one helped them along the way. But there is also the delight in hearing what they are doing now and relating it back to the PhD they completed some years ago. And in meeting ex-students from the past there is also a reminder of one's own academic trajectory through the topics one was supervising at a particular time (some of which one would now claim no expertise in).
In the last three months I have been fortunate to meet up with three of my ex-PhD students - all now living in other countries. One lives in Japan, a second a researcher in France, and the third a businessman in Germany.
My earliest research interests were in social and demographic changes in small rural communities, and one of my very first PhD students worked on rural depopulation in post-war Japan. As an undergraduate he came on a field class I ran in rural Normandy in France, and there is a line of connection from the ideas I introduced him to there, through his PhD, to the fact that he is now a professor in a private unviersity in Japan, with research interests in the history of rural Japan. He was in Sheffield to give a seminar in our School of East Asian Studies.
I later made a rural-to-urban migration and developed research interests in European cities (a field I have continued to pursue ever since). One year I supervised an undergraduate dissertation on gentrification in London's Docklands, and the student in question also came on a field class to Paris with me. On that class she and I decided on specific areas that would merit consideration as examples of the French governmental approach to urban renewal, and she then won a scholarship to pursue that topic. If we fast forward a number of years, through her employment in the European organisations in Brussels, she is now working on a major European-funded project evaluating the effects of European spending on urban policy. She was in Sheffield as part of the data-gathering work for her four-city study.
I met my third ex-student for dinner in London where he was on a business trip to evaluate the ways in which his German-owned retail company could break into the UK market. Over twenty years ago I was flattered that a student from Germany wanted to do his PhD on the residential mobility of Turkish migrant workers in Munich with me in Sheffield, rather than with a German supervisor at a German university. He could have had a superb academic career here afterwards, had it not been for his revulsion at the populist anti-German sentiment whipped up by news media such as the Daily Mail and the Sun during some international football tournament (I forget which).
All three become friends many years ago. I have met their partners and (most of) their children. When I was in Japan a few years ago my ex-student covered some distance to meet me and to have dinner together. I have stayed in the second home that my France-based ex-student now owns in Northern Provence. I have been entertained and wined and dined in Germany. And when I met them over the last few weeks, all three without prompting expressed strong positive feelings about what the University of Sheffield had given them, and the overall value of the education (not just the discipline but the wider approach) they had received here.
These rendezvous over the last three months have now led me to try to track down some other ex-students I have lost direct contact with. It will be interesting now to follow them up!
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