Karen Foley, Academic Lead for Student Hub Live (SHL) reflects on the recent virtual Freshers events which kick-started some of our Open University students off on their studies.
One of the things we do at Student Hub Live is show and tell all our new starters about the key things they need to know when they start their studies, and while I often ask guests who can tell it from the horses mouth so to speak, actually it’s the insight from other students that is invaluable. While there are some things that could be seen as factual, it’s the way we negotiate all of these things that seems to really matter – particularly when we are embarking on a higher education qualification with often an entourage of adoring dependents and a to do list that’s longer than your arm. Those negotiations are what makes the journey so interesting. We start and end at the same time, but the adventures in the middle are certainly unique. Its easy for me to interview students and ask what they wish they would have known when they started studying, and very often they say to enjoy the journey, but I didn’t really realise what that meant for me until our recent Freshers workshops.
I did my second degree with the OU after deciding I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, and I remember with great fondness the summer schools at Brighton, writing my TMAs and posting them to my tutor, and never quite knowing if I had got the video recording of a late night programme I was meant to watch (I never was confident with that piece of equipment!). I was always rushing to get my assignments in on the last day, was never up to speed with what was going on, and I struggled to fit in studying with full time work and volunteering. But it was fun, although I was young and none of it really seemed that important.
As time went on I got older and older, and never really stopped studying, and I have recently submitted a Doctorate in Education. It was intensive…. My to do list got longer and longer. As soon as I had submitted I would sort out my wardrobe, I would organise my office, I would declutter the kitchen cupboards…. but not now. There was writing to be done. Only it wasn’t getting done, and I realised when talking to a friend, that actually the reward waiting at the end of all of this was a 4 year long overdue spring clean of a house. That didn’t sound so great, and no wonder I was putting the whole thing off. So, I had to change my end goal, which was to celebrate with a bottle or two of something fizzy. That may sound incredibly logical, but I had no idea how stuck I was until that conversation, and that a really simple mindset change helped me to get unstuck.
But the other thing that I learned when talking to our new OU students at the SHL workshop was that I had been so focused on getting it done that I hadn’t enjoyed it. I hadn’t sat on my armchair in the sun with a cat on my lap and pondered whether my methodological choices were the best ones (this was my perception of academics you see….) and I hadn’t realised that torment of writing and writing the same thing over and over again actually added to clarity that made me think – well why didn’t I just write that in the first place? The last few weeks of writing 12 hours a day were something I looked at with a fondness, and I became jealous of my friends starting PHDs with all these delicious decisions to make. And I said to the students at that workshop, please don’t be like me and forget to enjoy it. The stuck bits, and the failures are awful, but without them you can’t grow and learn. I learned that being so focused on my end goal had taken away so much of the enjoyment, and that makes me sad.
So, of course, I’ll have to find another qualification to get my teeth stuck into soon. And next time I’m going to make sure I enjoy it as much as I did when I was younger, and the sun was always shining.
Catch-up with the SHL Freshers event on our YouTube Channel where we have a range of sessions for you to watch.
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