From across the great divide

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: the run-up to the new academic year

I've come to the conclusion that life would have been a lot simpler, if, ten years ago, I'd woken up with the burning desire to be an accountant.

Note, from the last entry, that even while slightly drunk, I can still look up the GDP of small island nations. Think of this what you will.

But, seriously, as long as there's money, the world needs accountants. And they do fairly well out of it if they even have a modicum of financial ability; accountancy would have been the way forward, ten years ago.

If I'd chosen that path - if I'd even thought it remotely the right thing to do - things would be very different now, let me tell you. For one, I'd be able to afford better clothes. I'd hopefully have found some lovely, accountancy-tolerating lady and settled down somewhere suburban. Hell, by now I might even have children, and I could be teaching my youngest the heady joy of balancing figures and tax-deductible income.

Instead, something in me decided ten years ago to just freewheel - or, more accurately, free - and go with the flow. Hence, a humanities degree. Humanities degrees, in the fullness of things, are like filmmakers; they benefit no-one. The recipient spends a lifetime justifying just why their degree is useful in any field other than, say, teaching or perhaps, at a push, proofreading. Anyone who comes into contact with a humanities graduate gets this glossy look in their eyes as if to say you spent three years doing what, exactly?

But a humanities degree, I've worked out, is just a useful way of keeping dangerous minds off the streets and inculcating sound principles on their strange little minds. I don't mean dangerous minds in the sense that yeah, daddy-oh, they're going to go out there and change the world, I mean dangerous in the sense that lava is dangerous when it's molten but solid when it's cooled, if that makes any particular sense. All these eighteen-year-olds I see here at the moment are so, so sweet but sometimes I want to sit them down and gently tell them that the world outside the education system is a dark, and often annoying, place.

I didn't enjoy my first go on the degree merry-go-round, in case you hadn't inferred that from this blog so far. The first year was confused - and confusing - and rushed and full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, leaving a lot of people completely unprepared for the seriousness of the second year. The third year was the only time I started to actually appreciate just what the hell was actually going on, and, more importantly, appreciate exactly what the point of study is.

Kind of.

And then the real world, shiny and cuttingly bright, beckoned, and suddenly the student overdraft needs paying and there aren't any jobs that pay enough to live any kind of fully independent life, and it all goes, quite frankly, to... No, that's not quite true. I paid my student overdraft and cultivated an odd little kind of independence from the odd little job I found and ended up staying at for about half a decade.

Now... I'm back, baby, and the undergraduate education system seems strikingly different to the one I left. It's a lot like returning to a workplace you left years ago to find everything changed; natural, but unsettling.

Take the marking system, for instance. Old style was 'pass 75% of your modules per year and you'll get a degree, if not a great one'. New style seems to be 'pass everything but don't worry about the grades in your first year; shit, 41% will do, kid, just so long as you pass. And by the way, we don't actually trust you to do independent study, so there are weekly negative-equity tests to pass - you get sweet F.A. if you do them but we'll dock lots of percentage points from you if you don't...'

It seems like an odd little way of preparing the young people of today for the sudden second-year seriousness of grades that actually matter, but hey, maybe it actually works. I don't know. I've been trying to convince my contemporaries that doing well now is something to be proud of, but I'm not quite sure it's getting through.

I feel a lot like a Cassandra, except for the 'most beautiful' part. (Or, strictly speaking, the 'daughter part. But hey.) I'm not a shining example of the merits of academia - pretty far from it, actually - but I do want at least one person I count as a friend here to take a little notice of my lessons in How Not To Fuck Things Up, from Crow, who has a P.h.D in the subject.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe not.

One thing that entertains me; upon applying for this course, I was asked to provide evidence of my most recent qualifications to justify my academic existence. This mean presenting my degree certificate in order to prove I was worthy of attaining a degree certificate.

I'm not proud...