Pat Fleming's story should be compulsory reading for all mature students. For Fleming, now a professor at the University of Limerick, began her studies at the ripe age of 40.
Born in London of an Irish father and an Austrian mother, she came to Ireland when she was eight and went to school in the Presentation Convent, Limerick. After her Leaving Certificate, she worked in various secretarial and administrative positions, as well as rearing a family of four children, now aged 28 to 39.
"When I left school, there was no university in Limerick. Some of the girls in my class went on to Mary Immaculate, for teacher training. I went to work in a travel agency."
Fast forward to 1983. "I was 40. My two eldest had left home and the last two were at secondary school. My husband had a company that was beginning to expand and I did the books, and then sent them on to an accountant. I used to say, I'd love to understand more about the accounting process."
So Fleming duly enrolled on a degree in business studies in what was then NIHE (now UL). "There were two mature students in the class. They told me at interview that with 23 years away from formal education, it would take me six months to get my concentration back." Fleming pauses significantly. "It did."
It's a little difficult to imagine this poised, determined, focused woman lacking in concentration. But, she says: "I could read a chapter of a book, close it, and remember nothing. The first set of exams I got Cs. With each set of exams, I got better and, after three years, I graduated with first-class honours." Whatever about further honours, her pride in this initial result beams out of her eyes.
"In my last year of the course, I took an entrepreneurship module. I had to do a business plan for a new start-up company. My son, Mark, had left his engineering course after two years to set up a business. I did the business plan. We worked together, looking at import substitution, and came up with an unusual product - surgical tapes." She begins to reel off the varieties: zinc oxide, silk, paper Fleming Medical now employs 25 people and has a turnover in the region of £3 million. Her son, Mark, the managing director, and Mark Dixon, a paramedic, have recently developed a pocket patient reporting system, for use primarily in ambulances. This is currently being market-tested.
As well as working with the company, Pat Fleming was teaching full-time at UL, though not in a permanent position. In 1990, she completed her masters and in 1999, obtained her PhD. Unusually, she was appointed professor before she was conferred with her PhD (although the work was completed). The Brendan O'Regan chair, which she now occupies, was founded, and is funded by an anonymous donor, in honour of O'Regan, an entrepreneur in the Shannon region in the 1950s and 1960s.
Fleming's job comprises three main aspects: research, teaching and outreach activities. She is supervising four full-time PhD students. Projects include internet usage in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); the role personal trust plays in SMEs; a comparative study of education for entrepreneurship between Ireland and Ghana (being undertaken by a student from Ghana); and family and business.
"There can be a lot of tension in family business, around inheritance, taxation and nepotism. Family business resource centres are very popular in the US but non-existent here. It hoped that the PhD student will set up a resource centre, based, long-term, in UL," she says enthusiastically.
On the teaching side, UL has a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and programmes in entrepreneurship. Fleming explains that, at undergraduate level, entrepreneurial studies is taught across all disciplines.
"The objective is to increase students' level of awareness that entrepreneurship is a career option. Students come to university. Why? They want to get a job. I like to walk into a third-year class and ask them have they ever thought of becoming an employer rather than an employee. They usually look at me aghast but then they start to become enthusiastic." Fleming is a true disciple, as well as a teacher, of entrepreneurship. For her, it's the only way to achieve economic growth and prosperity.
The college's graduate diploma in entrepreneurship is open to students of any discipline with a 2.2 degree. "In my experience, it's not usually the high academic achievers who are the achievers in business," she says. However, to progress to master's level, students must possess a minimum of a 2.1 degree. UL has a strong outreach programme, which provides advice and assistance to local companies. "Our fourth-year business consulting module involves students going out to client companies which have a problem or opportunity.
"The students meet the managing director, they set out a research brief, and that is confirmed in a letter of engagement." Students then spend 15 weeks researching the problem or opportunity before they make a formal presentation to the client.
Fleming says the college has helped 500 companies or individuals in the Shannon region since the programme was set up in 1984. "The delivery method of entrepreneurial education here is very practically focused, with a lot of assignments and project work." Entrepreneurial outreach in UL is not just confined to the Shannon region. There is a strong link with a number of colleges in South Africa. In 1998, an international professor of entrepreneurship position was created, spanning Port Elizabeth Technikon, Rhodes University and UL. A second chair was created this year between the Universities of Natal and Durban and UL.
Outside of teaching, fostering linkages, research, consultancy, company directorships and membership of various bodies, Pat Fleming says: "I've no time for anything else." But, after a little thought, she adds that she has seven grandchildren, from six years old down to two-week-old twins. "I love my garden, and decorating," she adds.
Fleming has come a long way - from tentative mature student, to graduate student, to award-winning researcher, to professor - thereby providing proof that (academic) life can begin at 40.
