“A supportive company culture is a must in order to unleash creativity”
Pola joined us early on, and when she joined she was in the unique position of writing a dissertation on the topic of access to leading universities for her MSc in Comparative and International Education at Oxford. She immediately started thinking about how her research could inform the way we work, and ended up creating our whole growth and schools-targeting strategy based on her research. Pola brought a rigorous, data-driven methodology to our organisation which now defines the way we work and the way we encourage our partners to work. She also created a strong culture of constantly engaging with feedback — both the good and the bad — to always seek out improvements to the way we work!
What did you study at university?
I studied a BA Economics and Management at Oxford and then an MSc in Comparative and International Education also at Oxford.
What have been your biggest achievements in Project Access?
I joined Project Access quite early on. At this point the team was buzzing with ideas and we were being pulled in all sorts of directions. The thing I am most proud of is aligning our growth strategy with evidence based on education research and ensuring that our decision making was data-driven. We connected with leading academics in the field and consulted them on recent research, which helped us understand how to target underrepresented students effectively. This became our main source of our external knowledge. Internally, I also launched evaluations of how Project Access was experienced by mentors and mentees, which allowed us to adapt our processes to meet their needs. I learned so much from these evaluations!
What are your ideas for what you’ll be doing in the future? Where do you most hope to work?
This photo is from a trip that a Project Access colleague and I took for a three-day weekend. We were going to “not do anything Project Access-related” but ended up spending a whole day of our trip looking over evaluation methods and creating a new evaluation criteria.
I currently work in a small team setting up the Education Outcomes Fund — a new way of financing educational interventions in developing countries which relies on paying for learning outcomes, rather than inputs or outputs. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work with something of this scale, which combines both my interest in economics and education. In terms of the more long-term future, I don’t have a particular company I would like to work for, but there are definitely skillsets I want to develop further. For instance, I really enjoyed thinking about evaluation at Project Access and would like to develop more monitoring and evaluation skills. At this point in my career it is also important for me to understand and learn from a wide range of sectors, like digital technologies, automation, healthcare — they all have important lessons for the education sector.
What do you think makes Project Access unique as an organisation to work for?
I love the culture of doers that developed here. Everyone here has great ideas, but the real bonus on top of that is that people take the initiative to make those ideas happen. There’s a general sense of creative freedom — no matter what your role is in the organisation, if you have a good idea and you’re ready to act on it the executive team will make every effort to support you in making it real.
What has been the most rewarding part of your Project Access experience?
I think I’m not the only one to say that the most rewarding part is reading through the mentees’ feedback. I only had one mentee, as my focus was primarily research and evaluation. When you deal with stats, it is easy to forget that behind those numbers there are ambitious young people in one of the key moments of their life. For some Project Access was a ‘nice to have’ additional resource, but for others the support seemed to be invaluable! Lots of them say that their mentors not only helped them with their application, but also inspired and motivated them to achieve their best. This reminds me… we should really find an effective way of sharing that feedback with the mentors!
What are the most important things you think you have learned?
This might sound obvious, but… I learned about the power of a supportive culture in an organisation. Having studied management from an academic perspective for three years I was very much aware of all the research showing the impact of different types of company cultures on the productivity of workers. But I think I never really appreciated how strong this impact can be not just on productivity but also on everyone’s wellbeing, motivation, and creativity.
What do you think is our biggest challenge going forward and how do you think we should tackle it?
NGOs’ overheads are chronically underfunded even though they are critical (like for any business) to support strong and stable growth of an organisation. I think one of the biggest challenges for Project Access will be building that internal capacity whilst delivering our day-to-day work.
Are there opportunities (work-related or otherwise) that you think Project Access has helped you get?
Definitely! The combination of responsibility and freedom I had at Project Access generated a long list of examples which I keep going back to whenever I’m asked a set of classic interview questions. On top of that, just having that experience of working for a very dynamic start-up in the social sector has opened my eyes to numerous opportunities outside of the more traditional corporate career path.
Best of luck with your work at the Education Outcomes Fund, Pola! We’ll miss having you on the team immensely, but are so happy to see you setting your skills to work for a similar cause.
