When I left school at 16 I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do, my GCSE grades were rubbish and I didn’t have any appetite for further education. I put this down to just not enjoying school very much. For various reason’s I just didn’t like being there, apparently my teachers said I had ‘potential’ but I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for school work. They only thing I really enjoyed at school was Physcial Education, playing sports and going on school trips like, skiing, camping, sailing etc. Being at a Navy influenced school and sampling a small amount of life in the Armed Forces made me seriously consider a career in the Army.
I often wonder (usually when I feeling a bit under motivated with I.T.) what my life would be like now if I had opted for a career in one of the Armed Forces. Instead I decided to try out a career in my other interest area which was computers, I had always been fascinated by computers from a young age. I went to my local college and tried to book myself on a NVQ I.T course, but to my disappointed it was fully booked until next term. Instead I signed up for a NVQ course in Business administration figuring I could get an office job somehow and work my way into I.T.
As it turned out this is exactly what happened, I completed the fast track version of the course in 6 months and started in an office job filing and doing paperwork. I showed off my I.T. skills to my employer and the rest is history.
Since then I have come along way in my career and so far everything I have achieved has been without any university degree. A lot of companies I have worked for have required their I.T. employee’s to have a computer science degree, despite this I have never found getting work a problem.
Lately I have been contemplating getting myself a BSc in a computer related area, purely for personal achievement (and maybe a little to appease HR). This month I bit the bullet and signed up to start my first part time course with the Open University. The degree I am going for is BSc (Hons) in Computing with Business, which I think will nicely complement my work.
The first course is entitled ‘Data, computing and information’ which I think is going to be a bit mundane for me, but will give me a good insight to studying with the OU.
I will be trying to overlap the course’s a little so I can complete the degree in the least amount of time possible, hopefully this will be around three years, maybe longer.
I’m quite excited to be embarking on this new journey of education and I’m not sure how hard it’s going to be to find the time to study, but it will be a great achievement for me when I finally do get that degree at the end of it especially when I think back to the time I left school and feeling like I can never be a success due to me not doing very well.
Education is very important but you need to want to learn and this is where I think most young students fail or drop out, education is forced upon them and sometimes they just aren’t mature enough to know the importance of knowledge and education.
I think that this goes to show that people can achieve anything no matter how well they did at school or their financial background, it’s getting up off your backside and going out to get it that matters.
