I didn’t do well at school. Which is to say that I didn’t really go. It was a bad time for me – not in a tragic ‘I had issues’ way (but I guess I did to some degree) but more that I thought it was a travesty that I was being forced to go to school when I all I really wanted to was to get out into the real world and get a job.
And thats what I did. I had a job lined up before my exams (those of which I actually took) were finished and I started work the first week after my official last day of school and since then I have been working. When I look back at my career to date I would be hard pushed to have imagined it based on the academic achievements of my 15 year old self, 25-ish years ago.
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To any perspective employers that have stumbled across this blog doing research on me: Stop that. Invite me in for a coffee and a chat and lets discuss more relevant things regarding the job you are considering me for.
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Fast forward from the mid eighties to 2015 and here I am, enrolling in an Open University degree to catch up on what I missed out on. I’m not doing this with any career related goal in mind (though who knows what this may lead to), instead I simply want to improve my knowledge on some subjects where my knowledge is, to be frank, kind of sparse. Namely; History and Classic Literature.
So here I go. Into the unknown. A student again aged forty (something).
I’ve signed up to an ‘Access Course’ which is for people like me that didn’t do any higher education and want to get some pointers on what its all about; Research, referencing, structure etc, before ploughing into a full module. The access course I’ve chosen is ‘Arts and Languages’ which will be a good segue into my History and Literature studies! I’ve chosen an ‘Open Degree’ as my main degree, which means I can study pretty much anything I like towards achieving enough academic points to achieve a degree – it means I wont specialise in any subject which is just fine by me as I’m not in this to get a specific degree.
The course starts next week and runs until June next year. I am determined to relax and enjoy this and I only hope that when I get a new job it will be one that gives me enough time to carry this on (at the time of writing I am a man ‘of leisure’ having recently been made redundant).
Updates as they happen!
steveslaw 