I got an unexpected message yesterday from an old friend that read:
“Hey, just realised I hadn’t let you know that you are part of my inspiration for deciding to study my bachelors and by extension a couple of other people who I’ve since encouraged to go back to “school”, just thought you might like to know :)”
Well, what do you know? I never thought of myself as being an inspiration to anyone to do anything! But of course as we progress though our lives, certain people effect us, and whether knowingly or unconsciously, they effect our decisions and life choices too. And we in turn impact on others I guess. It’s rare that someone takes the time to let you know though. That you’ve had a positive impact on them. Generally speaking, people are exceedingly quick to let you know if you are impacting on them detrimentally, but we have a tendency to often let the good stuff go unacknowledged. I am glad I have inspired this friend to return to study and find some new challenges, and through him other people too by the sounds of it.
Personally, I feel that education is a life long process, and shouldn’t be considered done and dusted as soon as you finish whatever high school, trade or university certificate is required for your temporally specific job ambitions. It doesn’t matter if you’re engaged in a formal tertiary education program, or whether you’re a voracious consumer of newspapers, or you enjoy a regular course of ‘steady’ reading ;), or maybe you’re someone who just gets caught up in grasshoppering through Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis – jumping from link to link to link gaining weird and wonderful tidbits along the way! I think it’s important not to stagnate and to keep learning new things about the world around us and our history, which in turn has a strange tendency to teach us new things about ourselves.
My own educational background has been somewhat hit and miss to get to this point. Out of high school I was accepted into teaching (senior Biology and English), not having applied for the Bachelor of Psychology I really wanted to do, as it was only available at James Cook Universtity at the time. After being accepted to study secondary teaching, I promptly deferred – keenly aware that teaching high school, where I had only so recently and happily escaped, didn’t actually sound that appealing. So I went to work for the govt as a clerk and finance officer for several years. Which didn’t suit me at all! Because, I am so crap with numbers! I remember once, while in that job, I actually lost $300,000 due to transposing a 9 and a 6, which took me three frantic sleepless days to find on a monster of a departmental budget report! Yuk!
I returned to Uni as a mature aged student – at the grand old age of 24! 😀 I enrolled in, and completed my Bachelor of Visual Arts with a major in Creative Advertising Photography. I never worked a great deal in the photography industry even with this qualification under my belt, as I altered course soon after completing to start a family instead. Lots of IVF, one gorgeous son, part-time book keeping jobs, a short stint in IT customer service support, an even shorter stint as an Account Manager and another car accident later… and I found myself returning to study again. This time as a real mature age student perhaps. 🙂
My situation is both fortunate and unfortunate. I have chronic neuropathic pain which makes me a rather physically useless creature, and a dreadfully unreliable employee! Something which sits very uncomfortably with my obsessive and ergomanic personality. So, at Mr K’s excellent suggestion, I returned to study to keep my brain busy and engaged – otherwise I think I would be sitting around the house going ‘Woe is me, I’m in pain… still!’, day in and day out. I enrolled part time in a Bachelor of Arts to do some history and literature courses that interested me, just for something to do. After about 60 credit points of that, one of my literature professors advised me to apply for the MPhil program (Masters in Philosophy)… she had been the RHD (Research Higher Degree) convenor at the Uni for over a decade and she told me I was wasting my time and talents doing undergrad classes for shits and giggles. I didn’t mind, I was learning stuff and getting plenty out of it.
The whole thing proved a bit much for the RHD admin office to get their heads around, so in the interim I enrolled in the Honours program as a back up. In the end my MPhil application was unexpectedly and unorthodoxly accepted, even though I hadn’t finished the BArts degree. Thus, with a week before classes were to start I had to decide if I wanted to do the Honours or the MPhil, and I chose – for the first time in my entire life – to follow the traditional course and do the Honours year first. I graduated my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History and then based on my grades and academic references, found myself applying for a PhD… mostly, because I could. I was accepted at Griffith and at the University of Queensland for their PhD programs, and chose to go to UQ… because that’s where the Medieval people are! (Griffith has a piss weak Medieval program all round).
All of this I relate to one end… you never know where these things can take you. I started out doing a course on ‘The Foundations of Western Culture’ and ‘World History’ with no particular direction in mind, and now I’m doing my PhD in Medieval political philosophy!
I guess the point is… it’s never too late to jump into the deep end!