Masters Life: Returning to study
Returning to study
At the beginning of this year, I got the idea that it would be fun to tackle my Masters degree. For the longest time I had been considering going back to university – partly because I missed learning and partly because I had always seen myself as eventually having a Doctorate degree. I don’t actually know why this has always been a vision of my future, I just know that I have always wanted it. So I sat down with my husband and we worked out the feasibility of taking on more. To give some perspective, our son was born in June 2014 (so I’m a brand new mama) and the reality was that I was going to have to return to work (at least on a part-time basis) in May 2015. Yet even with two such huge changes happening, I just felt that this was the time, and I needed something that would make me feel like me again, and not just this person who had been lost to the new label of ‘mama’.
So without telling anyone but my husband what I was planning, I set to searching for what degrees were out there that I was really interested in. I decided it was time to really follow my passion, rather than doing what was perhaps the ‘sensible’ option. By trade I am a secondary teacher and I adore it, yet I didn’t want to take on a Masters in Education. All my life, my passion has been Literature – both reading and writing my own, and yet beyond the Creative Writing major in my undergraduate degree, I had never really studied much of it, and so I decided it was time to focus on that. To my utmost delight, my application was accepted and I found myself enrolling in university again for the first time since I finished my second degree in 2008.
It’s now September. I’m a Trimester and a half into Deakin University’s Master of Arts (Writing and Literature), and I’m absolutely loving it. Sure, most people I talk to tell me that I’m crazy for taking on such a high-level degree when I also have a one year old and a job that, though part-time, is so time-consuming. But I have no regrets. It’s hard, yes, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but I expected that. It’s difficult to find the time for everything, given I study by correspondence in order to fit it all in, yet I expected that too and despite any of the elements that have made it complicated so far, I have enjoyed every moment of studying again. Especially those days when I get an assignment back with a mark that makes me feel like I am not simply doing well, like I’m not just getting by, but that I’m smashing it.
Studying again is definitely a choice I am delighted to have made for my life.