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| Image from dkalo.com |
The other day I read a blog post by @theatregrad, in which she describes her current life as a library school student. She was a successful funding applicant and is able to complete her library school Masters full-time without having to work. There is one sentence that struck me, which is why I am writing this post: "I wonder how the people who do work or commute or have relationships and families cope [with studying]." I don't have a family but I do have a relationship, have to commute and work. I shall tell how I, the unsuccessful funding applicant, cope with completing a full-time library degree.
Firstly, I think the saying 'money makes the world go round' is true. If you have money, whether it is just enough to pay rent, bills and food, or whether there are thousands of pounds to spare on a new car or house, your world goes round quite nicely. If you don't have money then your world stops. You can't pay your rent so you have nowhere to live. You can't go to a supermarket and buy food so you go hungry. So if you don't manage to get funding for your degree, then you need to find some way of getting it. In my case, having to work.
Fortunately, savings were able to pay tuition fees but there is the small problem of general living costs. Ideally, I would have one job with a decent wage that would let me work three days a week, the other two days spent at university. The ideal is not always reality, however, and I have ended up with two part-time jobs that take up the majority of my days.
For three days of the working week, I work 8:30am-3:30pm at one library. I then work 4:50pm-7pm at the other library. So nine hours and ten minutes (if my maths is correct) of my day is spent at work. The hour and twenty minutes between shifts is spent cycling to the Law Library to squeeze in some university work. My hour's lunch is spent over some journal article or book chapter. I often get up at 6am to get a little work done then too before I travel to work. By the time I get home in the evening, have cooked tea and eaten, it is approaching 9pm and my brain has shut down ready for sleep so I rarely do any work then.
The other two days of the working week are spent at university. The journey is two hours from door to door, and that's assuming the trains are not delayed. The train journey there is during lunch so, once again, I eat food whilst reading for university. The train journey back is very much the same except I don't eat. The lectures are from 2:30pm-7:30pm with an hour's break in between, in which I eat dinner over some other journal article or book chapter. I take advantage of the morning off and do university work then too.
So that's my working week. Not very varied. The weekend is not much dissimilar. I have to work Saturday from 8:45am-1pm. Then the rest of Saturday and Sunday is spent doing university work. @theatregrad also explains that "having nothing to distract me from staying on top of the workload is great." I haven't actually struggled to stay on top of my workload, despite how busy I've been. I haven't handed any assessments in late and I've done all the preparation required for lectures. With my time scale though, I only ever have time to complete the essential reading for lectures. Suggested reading is impossible to complete, especially when I have reading to do for assessments so I can actually write the things. The only way it could be done is not to sleep. But I like sleep. Very much.
So that is an example of an unsuccessful funding applicant's student life. Those spare moments where I'm not at work are spent studying. And this has to be completed without completely neglecting one's boyfriend, friends or hobbies (in my case, hobby).
It doesn't always work that way though. I am definitely experiencing a mid-term lull where there is little incentive or motivation to do university work. Then there are those occasions where I decide to go to the pub just to see people rather than get some much needed sleep. Then I spend half the weekend in London and actually forget about university (not for the entire evening but the majority of it). Then there are days where I have to work extra hours at my first job so, rather than having an hour's gap between jobs, I have to go straight to the second one. And then there are those times when I write blog posts, telling myself this is not wasting time nor procrastinating.
I don't mind being busy. I like it, in fact. Those few weeks where I didn't have a job were quite dull and completing job application forms or going for job interviews was not my ideal way of keeping busy. There is, though, a fine line between having just enough to keep you going and having so much to do that you never rest, the latter of which I am experiencing.
I'm not sure how other students who are working plan their days but this is how I do it.
