Kofi Ofori-Mensah, MSc Digital Marketing student
When I enrolled in the Extended Master’s route for my MSc Digital Marketing at the University of Roehampton, I expected it to sharpen my technical and strategic skills. What I didn’t expect was for it to become the bridge between two parts of my life I had never quite connected: my academic training in marketing, and my everyday work as a support worker for autistic and neurodivergent adults in the UK.
The extra semester gave me something most postgraduate journeys don’t allow for: time. Time to slow down, reflect, and ask a question that had been sitting quietly in the background of my career: why does the digital world so often fail the very people I support every day? Social media platforms are built on algorithms, sensory triggers, and design patterns that can overwhelm, exclude, or misrepresent neurodivergent users. As a marketer, I understood how these systems were built. As a support worker, I saw their human cost.
That question became the seed of my dissertation, Exploring the Lived Experiences of Autistic and Neurodivergent Adults with Social Media Marketing in the UK: A Thematic Analysis. Rather than treating neurodivergent users as a footnote in digital marketing research, I centred their voices using thematic analysis to surface patterns in how they experience, navigate, and are often failed by social media marketing a skill I learnt during my Extended Master’s Programme.
The research didn’t stay in the University. I had the privilege of presenting this work at the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) on inclusive social media marketing, bringing the conversation about neurodivergent digital experience directly to industry practitioners who shape the platforms and campaigns that millions of people encounter every day. That experience confirmed what the Extended Master’s had already taught me: research is only powerful when it moves beyond academia and into practice.
That belief is what led me to found NeuroDigitalSupport.com, a startup initiative that builds digital tools and resources centred on a single core idea: safe digital environments lead to safer outcomes for autistic and neurodivergent individuals. Everything from platform ethics to sensory-aware design work being developed through NeuroDigital Support traces directly back to the questions I first explored during my Business Ethics class at Roehampton.
Looking back, the two-semester Extended Master’s experience gave me more than a degree. It gave me the space to discover where my professional purpose actually lives, at the intersection of marketing, neurodivergent advocacy, and digital ethics. That clarity has carried me further than I expected: a leadership nomination and award at the University of Roehampton Future Awards, a role as a Roehampton Research Assistant Coordinator, and opportunities to present my work on national and international stages, including the ICCHP26 International Conference on Digital Inclusion.
My advice to students considering the Extended Master’s route, or any postgraduate journey at Roehampton: don’t rush the process of finding what genuinely animates you. The extra time isn’t a delay, it’s an opportunity. Let your dissertation be a real question, not just a requirement. Look for the overlap between your studies and your lived experience or existing work; that’s usually where the most original and meaningful research lives. And once you find that overlap, don’t keep it inside the university. Take it to industry bodies, to conferences, to the people building the systems you’re studying. That’s where research becomes advocacy and where advocacy becomes impact.
If my journey from support worker to researcher to founder shows anything, it’s that the most powerful career pivots often start with a question you’re brave enough to sit with a little longer than expected.