Alumni Profiles

Peter Chalk,
MA (1990) open/close

Stevie Christie,
LLB (1998) open/close

Profile by Stevie Christie - Wilderness Scotland

After leaving the University of Aberdeen in 1998 with a 2:1 degree - LLB (Hons) - I spent a year working and travelling in Canada and Latin America. On return to Scotland, I spent�three years working as a policy advisor at the Scottish Executive, mainly working on topics relating to the environment. However, I was presented with an opportunity to spend�three months working as a trekking leader in Namibia and found that too hard to resist! So I resigned from the Executive and took my first steps into adventure travel.

On return to Scotland, I started working with Wilderness Scotland as a walking group leader. While finding the guiding work rewarding, I also felt the desire to become more deeply involved in the business and help to develop it. Timing is everything, and, as it happened, the two company founders (Paul Easto & Neil Birnie) were looking to expand so I bought in as a fellow director and moved to Edinburgh, where I have lived since then.

Over the last�eight years Wilderness Scotland has grown to become the leading provider of high quality walking, sea-kayaking, mountain biking and adventure holidays in Scotland. We've won national and international awards for our holidays and these are often linked to the environmental side of our business - as well as the great holidays we provide for our clients! We now employ�six full time staff and around 15 seasonal staff, as well as working with many local partners around the Highlands and Islands.

We've also branched out and created a range of international adventure holidays in countries around the world - we market these under 'Wilderness Journeys'. These trips range from walking safaris in Africa to sea-kayaking in Norway's Lofoten Islands. These are not high adrenaline holidays - rather, they offer an inspiring way to experience some of the world's most incredible wild places, and the cultures and wildlife of those regions. We hope that this part of our business will grow as more people in Scotland choose to book with a locally owned company which has strong environmental and ethical credentials. I'm lucky enough to experience many of these destinations as part of my job, so I can assure you, first hand, that they are wonderful places to enjoy an adventure holiday!

The corporate market is becoming a more important part of our business too, as companies look to reward and incentivise their staff and clients with experiences which are innovative, sensitive to the environment and which can help them meet their CSR objectives.

I consider myself to be very lucky to run a business which I am very passionate about and which provides me with the most diverse range of daily tasks you can imagine! I would love to welcome AU alumni onto some of our trips sometime, in Scotland or overseas. For details, please visit www.wildernessscotland.com�and www.wildernessjourneys.com.

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Karen Darke,
PhD (1997) open/close

Another Mountain to Climb

The view from the summit of El Capitan rewards those climbers foolhardy enough to defy death and inch up its sheer rock wall. A four-day climb will take them to its peak, 1,000 metres from its base. Each morning from the safety of a harness and a 'bed' on a narrow ledge, they can marvel as the dawn breaks to reveal California's Yosemite National Park is in all its glory.

Karen Darke, 36, became the first British paraplegic climber to scale this intimidating mountain, achieving the summit was an extraordinary triumph. Fifteen years ago she was left paralysed from the chest down, when she fell 10 metres from a cliff in Aberdeenshire. El Capitan was her first climb since the dreadful day that changed her life.

She calls the ascent of El Capitan "her journey into fear".� During her descent of El Capitan, as she was piggy-backed down by her partner, Andy Kirkpatrick, she broke her tibia bone close to her ankle.

"I think it probably got stretched or pulled into an awkward position, but because I don't have any sensation, I don't really know," she says without the slightest note of concern. She flew into Manchester on Thursday, was checked over and treated in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on Friday, and that was that, she says. Life goes on.

Karen�works widely as a motivational speaker - her latest adventures will not come as a complete surprise. Since her fall in 1993 she has made a virtue of overcoming impossible odds. Within a year of her becoming paralysed, she competed in a wheelchair in the London marathon. Four years later, she crossed the Tien Shan and Karakoram mountains of central Asia on a bike powered by hand. In 2003, she sea-kayaked a 1,200-mile stretch of the Canadian and Alaskan coast. Living on the edge, she will tell you, is how she conducts her business.

For many of us, the sensation of falling is one of the most common nightmares. A year ago, as a prelude to this climb, Darke attempted a kind of personal catharsis in her autobiography, If You Fall, by writing about the experience on the cliffs at Cove near Aberdeen which was to change her life..

At 21, and a geology student at the�University of Aberdeen, she had been an athlete and keen climber and mountaineer. But the characteristic bloodymindedness which propelled her up El Capitan was already plainly in evidence even then. On a spring morning, she led an ascent of a cliff at Cove near Aberdeen and even though she quickly became physically tired, she refused to countenance the notion that her stronger companion might take the lead.

"My hands felt greasy against the cold rock," she remembers. "Beads of sweat showed my fear, and my muscles shook with fatigue - climbers call it 'disco leg' - but I had disco arms, too. My grip weakened and I felt the energy flow from my fingers like water accelerating down a drain. I called to Mark. I could hear the panic in my own voice. My mind was rigid with fear. 'Hold on,' I told myself. I felt terror flood through me as I realised I didn't have a scrap of strength left. I watched my fingers, as if in slow motion, slide from the rock."

Darke fell and, from the dreadful crumpling of her body, her companion thought she was dead. She lay drifting in and out of consciousness, heard the sound of the blades of the rescue helicopter and saw a school of dolphins in the North Sea before she fell into a coma which lasted for two days.

When she awoke in hospital, her head was braced in a metal halo. She had a chest level break in her spine and an unstable break in her neck. There were multiple fractures in her wrist, ribs, elbow and skull. The evening before her last climb she had told friends that her deepest fear was one day being paralysed. "I would rather be dead," she had said. Now she had to adjust to life as a paraplegic.

Most people in this situation would begin to accept that their life was to be diminished, their dreams reined in, their horizons lowered. Not Karen Darke. And her latest climb is the perfect illustration of the alternative path she chose - one in which life would be lived to its fullest possible extent.

The granite monolith of El Capitan is one of the most dangerous rock faces in the world. It asks question of seasoned climbers, and inevitably the challenge it posed Darke raised doubts her mind.

"I found it quite a tough prospect mentally. I couldn't get my head round the whole hanging your whole life off one rope thing any more. So I had two ropes," she jokes.

"I am used to being out of my comfort zone, but psychologically it has always somehow made sense before. This time it didn't. I was out of my comfort zone and only just keeping myself together. I was probably in a high stress zone of managing to stay focused on what needed to be done, which doesn't make it particularly enjoyable."

Karen returned to the University in October 2009 to talk about her life. Footage of this event will shortly be available to view online.

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Hamish Glen,
LLB (1978) open/close

Director

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Hamish began his theatre career as a stage manager with the Traverse Theatre and Paines Plough, subsequently joining Shared Experience as Assistant Director. Following this he formed the Writer's Theatre Company where he directed the British premieres of At It by Heathcote Williams and More Happy Chickens by Michael Duke. Working again with the Traverse Theatre, he directed the British premiere of Arthur Miller's Two Way Mirror and, as Associate Director of Tron Theatre, The Overcoat by Gogol, Burning Love by Kuse, Gamblers by Gogol, Babes In The Wood by Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson, and The Tom and Sammy Show by Peter Capaldi. Also As You Like It and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for the Royal Lyceum Theatre and Gamblersfor the Lithuanian State Theatre.

As Artistic Director of Winged Horse Touring Productions, Hamish directed The Magic Theatre by John Clifford (after Cervantes), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn by Chris Hannan, Bailegangaire by Tom Murphy, The Evil Doers by Chris Hannan and American Buffalo by David Mamet.

Hamish was the Artistic Director at Dundee Rep from 1992 � 2003. His work there included Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tartuffe, Uncle Vanya, The Hypochondriak, American Buffalo, Toshie by Stuart Brown, Death and the Maiden, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Cinderellaby Stewart Paterson, Hyde by Peter Arnott, A Greater Tomorrow by Hector MacMillan, The Weavers by Hauptmann, The Mill Lavvies by Chris Rattray and Michael Marra, Puss in Boots and Hansel and Gretel both by Stewart Paterson. Hamish also directed Walterby C P Taylor, adapted by Michael Wilcox for The Edinburgh International Festival.

In 1999, Hamish launched a project called New Ways of Working at Dundee Rep that centred on the creation of a full time ensemble company of eleven actors, and augmented each year by two apprentices. Hamish led them for the following four years during which time he directed them in Cabaret, Colquhoun and MacBrydeby John Byrne, A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Family Affair, Measure for Measure and Nightflights by Marcella Evaristi.

The Ensemble regularly toured Scotland throughout its life and its success was recognised by the Scottish Theatre Awards in the first year they were set up, and a doubling of Scottish Arts Council funding 2003/04. This enabled the Ensemble to become a permanent company.��

Other key successes of his Artistic Directorship was winning the Production of the Year TMA Award for On the Line, A History of Timex in Dundee, bringing Rimas Tuminas over from Lithuania to direct the Ensemble in The Seagull in 2001 and taking Dundee Rep's production of The Winter's Tale to Iran in January 2003 where it won Best Foreign Production.

Hamish's work abroad includes Gamblers by Gogol for the Lithuanian State Theatre, The Hypochondriak for Mikkeli Theatre, Finland, which later transferred to The Tampere International Festival, What The Butler Saw for Tampere T. Theatre and A Delicate Balance by for Helsinki City Theatre.

Hamish became Artistic Director of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in March 2003, directing The Rink by Kander and Ebb, in 2005 a new adaptation of Moli�re's The Hypochondriacand most recently Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti and The Night Before Christmas.

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Kenny Hutchison ,
MA (Hons) (2006 ) open/close

Kirsty Macpherson,
LLB (1997) open/close

Aberdeen Graduate one of a select minority in successfully skippering a yacht to St Kilda

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Not that it was easy for the lifelong sailing enthusiast. "I'd tried to get there a few times previously," says the commercial property specialist, "but the weather can play havoc and we had to turn back." On her fourth attempt, as the skipper of a 39-foot Beneteau boat chartered for the trip, she got lucky with the conditions.

The effort was, she says, well worth it. "It was incredible to see St Kilda rising out of the mist as we arrived. We saw dolphins on the journey and the most beautiful sunset. We travelled overnight and moored in Village Bay, which meant we could go exploring for the day. It was very special."

Macpherson has been sailing so long that she can't remember when she first stood on deck. "Throughout my childhood, we sailed as a family off the west coast of Scotland," she recalls. "I think I was only six months old when I was first on a boat." Later, Macpherson gravitated to skiing while studying history at the University of New Hampshire (becoming a member of the Scottish ski team), but resumed her love affair with the ocean in her mid-20s, by which time she had returned to Scotland to complete a degree in law at the University of Aberdeen.

�"I did a lot of sailing then in my hometown of Inverness," she says. Much of this entailed working with children from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom she took sailing on a 70-foot ketch under the auspices of the Ocean Youth Trust.

"It was hard work," Macpherson admits, "but they tended to stop being cheeky when they got seasick." She also sailed with children suffering from serious illnesses, who were being treated at York Hill Hospital in Glasgow. "It was very rewarding taking these kids sailing. It was nice to feel that you're giving something to people less fortunate then yourself."

Macpherson also found time, at the outset of her legal career, to spend a month working as one of the crew on a square rigger in Canada. "It was completely different to the sailing I was used to," she says, "I had to learn fast."

Nowadays, work as partner in a law firm means that everyday recreational sailing isn't an option, so she looks forward to a couple of major trips each summer, returning to her family's happy hunting ground of the west coast of Scotland. "It's so beautiful there," she says, with her thoughts turning to a trip next summer from Ullapool along the dramatic Sutherland coastline.

Macpherson says that sailing does act as a form of stress relief from the demands of her job, but believes there are parallels between sailing and the law. Indeed, she goes so far as to say that sailing is "almost an extension of what I do at work. Both law and sailing involve team-work and strategy. I'm responsible for the safety of my crew and must set co-ordinates for the trip, including alternative routes and contingency plans in the event of bad weather. Time management (judging the tides) and people management are both � as in the law � crucial."

But there is a difference. "When you're crossing the Minch [the notoriously treacherous straight separating the Inner and Outer Hebrides] you've got to have a back-up plan if things go wrong. Again, this is analogous to legal practice. But you're dealing with purely practical things, not paper. It's real life happening in fresh air, under the open skies."

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Rick Rait,
MA Management Studies (2001) open/close