Life after OU

It was a strange feeling this year when so many of my friends and former fellow students were all excited about receiving new course materials, being allocated to new tutors for their new modules and starting into a new course with great curiosity…and I? What did I do?…well I felt that all this seemed so, so far away already, but it has only been 1 year that I, too, was starting new modules at the beginning of a new year. This year though, it was a new job that I embarked on, my first job after my degree. The last weeks have been very busy and it is a real challenge to keep on top of things, but I am surviving and will get there in the end.

Being so busy, has meant however, that I had very little time to actually look into options for masters and funding. I did some research throughout the last months, and it is dawning more and more to me, that I will not be able to self-fund a master! the fees are just too expensive for me to handle, and so I will need to look into alternatives. I am still kind of hopeful to find some funding somewhere, but to date nothing has come up.

The master that I was currently looking at is the MSc Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck, London. They offer a distance learning opportunity and I have heard from students doing this course at the moment that they were very happy and satisfied with the overall procedure in the distance learning part.

2012 in review

Big thanks to all you guys out there busily reading, commenting and ‘liking’ my blog! Have a happy new year guys and see you in 2013!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Hello from in between

So, it is that time of the year in between Christmas and New Year again….gosh…that came quickly!

I’m spending these days with my family in Germany and it has been rather relaxing. Christmas eve was spent baking without any Christmas present hassle and havoc and the remaining days were full of relaxation and family visits too. Just lovely!

Now that the main bank holidays of Christmas are over though, I sat down to work though a big pile of paperwork and I am happy with what I’ve achieved so far…there is light at the end of the tunnel!

I hope that all of you out there are enjoying the festive season as much as I do and that we all arrive safely in the year 2013! What will it bring for you? What will it bring for me? We shall see and watch curiously of how things go on. I thing one major and to be remembered event will be my graduation ceremony, which will take place on 6th April in London. Anyone else going?

Crossroads

The big question which is now more and more occupying my mind is: What next?! I’m finding myself at a crossroads and need to decide which way I want to go.

With the results day behind me, my degree accepted, I am now a proud owner of a first class honours degree in Psychology, but what shall I do with it? What do I want to do next? What do I want to do in my life? How much can one plan life? What does really make me happy?

One of the possible questions in a situation like this, seems to be to ask oneself:

What would I do if money wouldn’t matter?

This is a question (apparently) which one can use as a guide to what one really likes doing. Most of us might react with:

But money does matter! Or how am I going to be able to afford accommodation, food and leisure activities?

And in our current world this is of course true. Money has to come from somewhere, and normally we have to earn it ourselves by going to work every day. But are people happy if they do that? Are they truly content with their lives and how they spend their time to get the money they need? Some of them might be, but many might not.

I, for myself, can answer a question like the above, about what I’d do if money didn’t matter with:

STUDY!

Because if there is one thing in life I truly enjoy and for which I would even pay (and actually did pay in the past ) to be able to do it, then it is studying! Hence, it seems pretty obvious that if I anyhow want to make myself happy in life, I will have to find access to the resources it needs to do a masters and then and some point even a PhD. I’m aware that money is not gong to fall down from sky, but I am starting a journey into lots of research about funding opportunities, scholarships (might have a chance there actually with my first class honours degree?!) and other research assistant positions, which will hopefully allow me to do what I really enjoy: study!

(PS: For anybody who’s interested in the idea of ‘what if money didn’t matter’, check out this youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8nif01WZ9aI)

 

First class

So…is this it then?

Today I received my last two module results for ED209 Child Development and DD303 Cognitive Psychology. I got 74 % on ED209, which is a Pass 2. For DD303 I managed to get myself 86% in the exam. Combined with my OCAS of 88% for that module, this means a nice smashing Distinction for Cognitive Psychology . But the party doesn’t end here!

Thanks to the Distinction in DD303, I have earlier proudly accepted my First Class Honours degree in Psychology!!! CELEBRATE!!!! 3 years of hard work and no breaks at all have paid off and here I am with my first class honours! AMAZING!

Where have I been?!?!?!?!?

Well, to cut a long story short: I have been lost in time and space. The last months have been nothing else but STRESS! It was pretty bad, but somehow I managed to get myself through the exams (of which one was a nightmare and the other one a dream *lol), finish off my au-pair job in rural Suffolk and have now moved to Ipswich and am trying to find work. Life is still going pretty much upside down, but I shall be getting there at some stage

I have spent some time about whether this blog should go on at all, now that my OU journey has come to an end, and I decided YES! It is probably quite interesting for you guys out there to follow my path of life for a bit longer. There is many challenges ahead (such as finding work or getting myself onto a master and especially to decide which master ) and I shall try to keep this page up to date as well as I can. Hopefully there’ll not be a time as in the last weeks again where it was just IMPOSSIBLE to even think about my blog…with things calming down, all I can say is…for now… I’m back

Here’s my challenge!

Last night I got TMA5 from DD303 back. It is my report about the project I had conducted at residential school in Brighton in July.  I got a nice 85% for it with which I’m happy. I would have welcomed an even higher mark of course, as that would have given me some more of a “buffer” for the exam, but here we go.

TMA5 counts as 30% of the OES and the exam itself will count for 70%. I calculated that with having achieved 85% in TMA5 now, I’ll again need 85% in the exam to pick up the distinction which I’d really quite like to have! I currently have an OCAS of around 88% so it would be absolutely awesome if I managed to get a distinction in the exam! Because….if I did, then this would bring me a first class honours degree ! Anybody doubting why I’m up for this challenge now?! I can see that theoretically that distinction is just around the corner and I’ve been working hard the last days to make the most of the revision time I have. So hopefully…with a littel bit of luck …. we’ll see *hope!!!!!!