Entering the academy: Perceptions of scarcity and abundance

While my professional life has in a sense been defined by an ongoing engagement with higher education, I remain a relative newcomer to the sector as an employee. Until 2005, my association with tertiary education had been predominantly as a student involved in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees over roughly 25 years. My transition into work in higher education followed a lengthy career as a secondary teacher and administrator in secondary schools overseas and in several Australian states. In navigating my way through, and playing a role in the management and leadership of these numerous workplaces, I experienced and contributed to the organisational mindsets of abundance and scarcity by which they were strongly influenced. I also developed a "from afar" perception of organisational mindsets in higher education as engendering among people more flexibility, adaptability, innovation, futures-oriented thinking and the like than what I had previously encountered in the secondary education sector. In short, I had envisaged mindsets of greater abundance. In the sections that follow, I discuss how my lived experiences in my flrst higher education appointment mediated this perception in different ways.