Elise Phillipson was 45 when she returned to university, on what she calls her “second or third life”. She had first studied hotel management; as a nine-year-old growing up in Hong Kong, she asked her father what she should be, and he suggested she work in a hotel.
In adulthood, she retrained as an English teacher, married and raised two children. By the time her youngest started primary school, she found herself wondering again what occupation was right for her.






