I don't tend to document my studies much anywhere really. I dont have a normal student life and my degree is an extra little thing in my life. Here's the story: at 18 in sixth form I was pushed to get go to uni. Didn't matter where or what for but they just wanted as many of us at univeristy as possible. I initially wrote my personal statement about for a Marketing degree. I showed my form tutor and I think he could read that I didn't really have any interest in what I was writing at all. He said maybe it was the course, so I switched to Law. I know now that it wasn't the course at all, because my degree now is Business and Marketing. It was just that at 18, I wasn't ready for uni at all.
I didn't fancy moving out. I loved the idea of it, and I was already working weekends in London so a part time job wasn't alien to me. Like I said, I just wasn't ready. It's funny because it so many other things we know that kids aren't ready to do things always at the same time as their peers. I may have started walking 6 months earlier than someone a couple of days older than me. Doesn't mean they never walked. Just meant that at that time, on that day, they weren't ready. No one pushed them and said 'get on with it and just walk'. So why do they push 18 year olds to just jump and get on with uni.
Anyway I settled into driving 4 times a week up to my uni, an hour away on a good day. 2 hours away at 7am on a Monday morning on the M25. I got used to it. There was one teacher who genuinely scared me to death. I didn't attend a single class of his but the uni would never know. All I had to do was sign in via tapping my badge on a reader once a week and it signed me in for all of my classes.
I did enjoy it though. For the most part. I may a friend or two, we went for coffee, and I'd come home and sit for hours working. I think that was the problem. I couldn't stay and study at the library because I would hit solid traffic on the way home. Everyone had their cliques from their student houses so most knew someone in their class already. I didn't go to freshers, because I had no one to go with, and I couldn't be apart of unions, purly because they were on diffrent days to my classes and I was not prepared to drive up for no reason. Oh, and my teachers would barely turn up at all. There was also that.
I left in the February and went to work full time as of that September in my secondary school. And for a year thats where I was. Just working full time at my first 'proper job' and content that I was getting a full time income at aged 19, when all of my friends were living on beans in a dirty house with strangers.
Anyway after a year I got very bored. I've always enjoyed learning as such, never minding the essays I'd write, and after going cold turkey for a year, I wanted something more. I found that the original uni that I'd wanted to attend (never getting the grades in sixth form for it so went to my second choice for a few months instead), did an online course. Part time and fully online. I jumped at it, had a telephone interview and started that September (2017) on a Business and Marketing degree. And three years later, here we are, about to embark on my 4th year (and HOPEFULLY final year, if I can double everything up in time).
What I've learned?
1. Don't listen to anyone else's advice on what you want to do. Maybe I'd have dropped out of uni eveen if I'd have done that Marketing course the first time round, but I wish I'd have tried it instead of Law that only made my mother happy and the school look better.
2. If you don't fancy it, don't do it. I do thank God a little that I went into full time work and then got a degree. Because I grew up far quicker that way than living in that student denial world of more and more education and not understanding how the real world works.
3. I am also very glad that I waited until NOW to do it. My essays go hand in hand with my blog and Instagram bits, and I know things through my experience on here that I wouldn't have back in 2016/2017, because it wasn't the same then.
4. My timekeeping is bang on. I leave things until the last minute for sure, but I never forget to do something or hand something in late. And touch wood I've always passed it.
5. It doesn't matter how you did it, it's that you did it. I know that a first class degree is fab, and a 2:1 is better than a 2:2 of course. But as I'm not told what I'm on track for, and we aren't given grades at the end of each year (because there aren't really ends to years, we just carry on until we graduate) I don't care so much about them. I would love a good mark of course, but I've had high grades and I've had just pass grades. I just want to throw my hat in the air and take a fabulous head shot with that rolled up paper to blow up and hang in my grand old office one day. Try your best, but in the end a degree is a degree. I don't know the grades of any of my friend's who've got one, and wouldn't care either way regardless.
I don't have the usual student experience. We don't have an online freshers week or online student union. But I'm fully okay with that.
If you want to find out more about my online course, please let me know!
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