Medic, BSc

You might have noticed that yesterday I was talking about the Open University and how I studied with them. It might in fact have seemed a little suspicious, since this was something I had been doing on weekends and Wednesdays for the last 7 years, and I’d only started talking about it this year, both in yesterday’s article and an article a while back talking about an Open University course about web and mobile technologies.

Well, as of today, I have a BSc Open Degree with honours. Which means I can stick BSc behind my real name.

Actually, I found out on the 23rd that I’d passed my final course, the aforementioned TM352 course, it was confirmed on the 24th that I had earned enough credits to get a degree and it becomes official today. I’ll get a physical certificate in about a month. Maybe longer because of postage to Cyprus. After seven hard years of work, I have finally managed to work my way towards a degree.

And it was a lot of hard work. I basically dedicated every Wednesday and chunks of my weekends to work on this. Hours upon hours of hard work. It’s nice to know that my effort actually went into something and I’m getting something out of all of this, because sometimes I felt like I was wasting my time.

Except… maybe I was? I mean, degrees aren’t really worth much these days, are they? You’re kinda expected to have a degree for anything above washing dishes or serving tables, which is pretty insane. Looking up job openings for the things I already do (graphic design, web design, product design and print), most people want a degree and 5 years of experience. The experience I already have but the degree? I just got that. Companies want you to have a qualification of some sort.

Oh well. I did learn a lot while working on my degree. What I learned was mostly fundamentals though, the basis of things that I can then extend out into other, work-based things. Like, I learned the basics of Java and object-orientated programming but not really how to turn that Java knowledge into something… that I can sell. I also learned that I fucking hate coding and honestly kinda suck at it. I am very, very good at building on existing code, but writing code from scratch is simply above me. I also realised I hated doing design courses. Thing is, design itself is cool, but the courses I did seemed to focus mainly on designing for everyone, accessibility, environmental design and covering as many bases as possible. It’s interesting but also tedious and boring and repetitive.

Did I enjoy studying? No, not really. It was hard and tedious and nebulous and just… ugh. Some of it was genuinely fun, but I think seven years of this stuff has worn me out entirely. I pushed though and I was studying even during breaks – there are supposed to be study breaks over holidays but I never actually took them. Heck, I started studying and working on each course as soon as the courses were available.

Do I recommend this to other people? Kinda. If you can concentrate.

Still, I have my degree now. Which means I can stop studying and start working full time! Oh. Wait. I was already doing that.

Piss.

Oh well. Yay me. I got a degree. Medic BSc.