My first experience with the Higher Education Academy Fellowships, as it was then, was back in 2016, when the Academy itself was very new and everyone was quite uncertain about what was needed to ‘prove’ your cred as a University teacher. I had looked at the PGCAP route but since I’d been teaching in higher education for about twelve years already at that point, it didn’t really seem right for me. Fortunately, a colleague and I stumbled upon Max Addo and David Andrew, via a referral from someone in another Institute who were very warm and encouraging guides and mentors and helped me get together my D2 Fellowship application which was one of the first ones to be submitted to the QMUL Teaching Recognition Project after its accreditation by HEA in 2017.
The process had been quite confusing and at times frustrating, and I suppose I wanted to make it less of a grind for other colleagues coming after me, so I agreed to be a mentor and an assessor for TRP applications and have done that for the last five years, mentoring a further seven staff through to successful AdvanceHE D1 or D2 fellowships. In the meantime I have also obtained my own D3 Senior Fellowship: which was a lot of work, but also much more straightforward than my D2 thanks to the greatly improved guidance and mentoring available from QMA.
At the same time a real community has sprung up around the TRP; a group of academics who are truly cross-faculty and interdisciplinary and enjoy thinking about what our education practice means and helping others to make sense of theirs and gain the recognition they deserve for it. I would say I came for the [mentoring] cake but stayed for the company, definitely.