Dr Shunqi Zhang

Dr Shunqi Zhang is a Research Fellow within the social sciences at the University of Southampton. She was a member of the University's first Prosper cohort in 2025.

We caught up with Shunqi to talk about her career journey and her experience with Prosper - you can read the full interview below.

Role

Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Population Change, within the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Southampton

Case study conducted

September 2025

What is your background as a postdoc?

I’ve had a pretty atypical career journey to-date, blending the qualitative and the quantitative.

I got my first degree from South China University of Technology, majoring in journalism and communication. I then got my masters and PhD at the University of Manchester in social research methods and statistics.

I don’t have a very specific area of research in this early stage of my career, but am broadly interested in issues relating to social inequality.

For almost a year now I’ve been working at the ESRC Centre for Population Change within the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Southampton, on a project looking at intergenerational support during the cost-of-living crisis.

Why did you join the Prosper cohort?

I attended a Centre for Higher Education Practice (CHEP) session about how to build up our education portfolio through daily practice. Dr Curie Scott [who runs Prosper at the University of Southampton] was sharing her expertise and introduced us to Prosper.

I was quite new to my role at Southampton at the time, and this is the first job I’ve had since getting my doctorate.

Curie talked about how the Prosper cohort would be ideal for planning your career as an early career researcher – and I thought this could be really beneficial for me.

I was in a new city and unsure of my next steps – and apart from that, the Prosper cohort seemed like an interesting “extracurricular” activity, and way to make connections. So I thought, why not?

How did you find the Prosper cohort?

It was brilliant. I didn’t expect to get nearly as much out of it as I did!

If I could sum it up in three words they would be: supportive, interactive and practical.

The practical aspect was key. I’ve been in a lot of career development sessions previously where the content wasn’t really actionable – just explaining things I already know, and narrowly focused on traditional academic career pathways.

I needed something more down to earth and realistic, and the content of the Prosper cohort was very much designed with that in mind.

For example – we had a session on showcasing your skills on your LinkedIn profile. This was something I could immediately put into practice.

Which aspects of Prosper did you find most useful?

I’d call it a mindset. ‘Transferable skill’ became this magic word that completely transformed the way I think about my career and development.

When you’ve been within academia for so long it’s a bit like being in Plato’s cave. The way we think about skills and accomplishments is very particular to academic career progression. We don’t really know what employers outside academia value, or how to showcase our abilities to them. Some of them we don’t really think of as distinct skills at all.

But when you start to think about your skills in this language of transferable skills, suddenly you realise just how much you can do. It can be very broad like the ability to think analytically or strategically, or something as specific as report writing, data preparation, or presentation.

Ideas like the STAR Method and creating an ‘experience bank’ also feed into this. I now know to make a record of all my achievements, even small things like e.g. giving a 5 minute talk at a workshop here in Southampton. You never know when it’ll be useful to use these examples in the future to showcase this or that skill.

It’s like a new language that unlocks all sorts of possibilities. It changes your mindset, and makes the idea of exploring new and different roles far less daunting (and makes the application process much easier too).

Before joining the Prosper cohort I didn’t even think about the possibility of leaving academia. We pick up our expectations from our peers, and I was always surrounded by academics.

But the cohort - talking to other postdocs also on fixed term contracts, also thinking about their careers – opened up the idea of adventuring outside this world, thinking about all the different things we could do beyond.

I’m still primarily focused on pursuing a career in academia, but Prosper made me realise it would be OK to go beyond, that academia is not my only option – that I will survive outside.

The opportunity for reflection was also really valuable – thinking in a group about how our backgrounds have influenced our mindset-to-date, and what we really want from our careers.

As I mentioned, the community element of the cohort was also really supportive. I really like the informality of the lunch discussions we had – you can get to know people and have discussions that you can’t have in the classroom or lab. When you discover how many others have similar concerns or thoughts to you, it really puts your own challenges in a new light.

What are your future career plans?

Earlier on in the cohort, I still didn’t feel I had the confidence to explore the ‘world beyond the cave’.

This changed when we had a session about job applications. One of the exercises was for us to find three jobs that you think you might be a fit for, and prepare applications for them.

I found a data analyst job at the Cambridge University Press. And in doing the exercise I realised it’s not nearly as hard as I imagined. Applications outside academia are very different to those within, and this practical experience made me much more confident about this potential avenue. So, again, it’s about the mindset change, that confidence.

As for my actual future career, I’m currently preparing an application for a UKRI policy fellowship. The role appeals to me because it’s not pure abstract research – it’s role that translates your research into concrete policy. I guess you could say it’s a hybrid role between academia and non-academia, or ‘academia-adjacent’. It’s a step into the world outside academia and Prosper helped give me the confidence and perspective to go for it.

I might not get it, but that’s OK – I know I have lots of options, Prosper has broadened my horizons. I still want to work broadly in social science, working on social inequality, but there’s lots of different ways to do this.

If there’s one bit of advice you could give to a postdoc that was in the position you were in before you joined Prosper, what would it be?

Just do it! I got so much from it. It hasn’t just benefited me either – I’ve been able to use these tools and new ways of thinking to help friends who haven’t done Prosper reframe their challenges. I can direct them to the material.

It’s a very comprehensive programme that you can benefit a lot from. Just do it! At the very least, you might make some new friends – which is worth it in itself!