Victoria spoke to our Year 13 students in September about her career path post Hymers and where this has taken her.

She is a qualified Architect and chartered with the ARB following the completion of her studies at the University of Nottingham. She has worked in practice, both as the director of her own architectural practice and also as an employee of practices in Nottingham working in variety of different sectors. She has also worked with the fields of facilities management, BIM, occupancy planning, architectural visualisation and interior design. Victoria is incredibly passionate about architectural education and it is this that lead her into teaching in 2008 where she began working as an academic at the University of Lincoln and Nottingham Trent University.

During her time as an academic, Victoria has developed networks with organisations working in USA, and South Africa, which have provided her with the opportunity to both teach a number of times in the USA and also collaborate on numerous international projects and research activities. In 2011, Victoria was one of the founding members of the aae (association of architectural educators) and in 2013, Victoria hosted the inaugural aae conference at NTU to formally announce the association of architectural educators and the aae journal, Charette, for which she is a reviewer. This event was attended by over 40 different countries around the world. In 2014, Victoria supported the second aae conference at Sheffield University whilst on the conference committee and most recently, the aae conference 2016 at the Bartlett University where she presented research on the use of social media in the design studio.

Through the aae, Victoria has continued to work to support the improvement and development of architectural education in the UK. She has set up the aae and Vectorworks scholarship programme which provides free software to schools of architecture in the UK and continues to develop strategies to enhance learning for her students. In 2014, Victoria moved to join Birmingham City University in the role as Programme Director and Year 1 year leader. Having worked for more than 7 years delivering teaching and learning within the undergraduate years and postgraduate programmes at various institutions, Victoria is very experienced in her discipline. She has taught across the following fields within higher education: architecture, interior architecture, theatre design, architectural technology, BIM, CAD and digital architecture and a number of other specialist areas.

Thank you so much for your time today, Victoria. We thoroughly enjoyed having you with us.