Eoghan Hanlon, freelance media professional, describes his experience of an AgeWise workshop – and an unexpected realisation. Having just finished a postgraduate course last year, he was considering how our assumptions of ‘what makes a student’ are still very age-focused. “I considered the experience of a college classmate of mine, who was in her fifties. She felt acutely aware of her own age in comparison to the rest of the class (the oldest of whom was twenty years younger), but the rest of the class just saw her as another classmate. I figured that she herself was a victim of a sort of internalised ageism... However, I then remembered an incident where the class was split into two groups for a project to produce a magazine aimed at students. At each and every stage of the project, both groups implicitly assumed that targeting students meant targeting people from their late teens to their early thirties. This was despite having a classmate in her fifties sitting in the same room. She even reinforced this attitude as she stated that she was worried that she had little to contribute to the magazine’s content due to her age!”