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DR. BILL MALLON, PhD
Founder/Manager
Academic Development Specialist
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+353 87 338 6612
It takes guts to admit we cannot go it alone, to reach out to a stranger and say: "Hey, I'm lost". That's why the lighthouse is my symbol for the company, a light in the dark to guide people back home. Soppy, I know; but soppy pays the bills when idleness is at work!
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We don’t do gatekeeping here, nor do we engage in hierarchical forms of othering. I’m here to help you, and so the last thing you need is someone else standing above you on some plinth you already think you’ll never scale. I set this business up because I’m an anomaly, an outlier in college. Well, at least I thought I was because once I set my business up I began to realise something – there’s a lot more people like me out there, those who recognised the need for a college education but which never fully felt “right” within that system and its sensibilities. Imposter syndrome has been an old friend of mine throughout college and it wasn’t until I left that I realised that, well - quite obviously - life is what you make of it.
And so is your career.
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I've had a diverse academic journey, to say the least; a degree in Archaeology and ancient languages from UCD, before continuing on with that line on thought in my Masters and Doctoral study, in Mater Dei, and DCU, respectively. Both my master’s and PhD were in the realm of textual criticism and hermeneutics, an attempt to understand language and culture, of how words move through texts, of how speech can be persuasive, of how structure and order in the written word can shift political, religious, and cultural thought and, indeed, sink it.
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I was unemployed after college for a good while, unable to find work, unable to find a profession that suited me. This was because I left college in much the same way I entered it - lost and searching for meaning. A chance encounter with a therapist set me on the right path, when discussing my goals after finishing my PhD:
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“What do you learn”, they asked.
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Having recited back to them the course programme and its modules, they asked again:
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“No, what did you learn?”
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It took me a few weeks to chisel away at that nugget to fully understand its meaning:
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“What can you take away from all you have done?”
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Now, that’s a question we should all ask ourselves, for the college qualification is only a tiny part of the college experience and yet it’s so all-encompassing you’d be forgiven for thinking the whole point of college is to get that “piece of paper”. And for a lot of people, that’s what they end up with. Thus, when they go looking for work, they bring with them only the piece of paper and nothing else.
The education I received allowed me to progress to master’s and doctoral level where I furthered my cultural and linguistic endeavours, now exposing myself more broadly to cultural criticism and literary and structural form. But that was only the beginning. Once I realised what I actually learned, I unlocked my full potential. Indeed, my skills actually allowed me to evaluate and work on documents for clients in completely different sectors to me, helping them unlock the sources of their own research issues and, indeed, their research goal. This socio-scientific analysis of texts has also allowed me to strategize and conceptualise solutions to problems given to me. Indeed, at the time, my business itself was a novel solution to an issue I identified in college. As both strands have their basis in communication, their usefulness is paramount in being able to think critically and solve problems, to demonstrate information literacy, to understand an espouse ethical and civic responsibility, and of course, to communicate effectively. These are traits fostered in college and which are expected to be fostered in today’s workplace.
So, what have you fostered thus far?
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