Back to School

Most of you are aware that the word "brief" could accurately be used to describe my university experience previously. Other good words that could be used with equal accuracy are "stoned", "pissed" and "Championship Manager". I don't think I ever really gave it a good enough go and that has bugged me ever since. It's not that I regret leaving uni when I did, that was definitely the right move at that time, but times have been a changing and I thought that it was about time I took another look at it. So take another look I did.

The first question on the list was "How much time have I got?" I need to work full time, end of. I love my flat but I love my mortgage a little bit less. It demands feeding like a hungry angry baby once a month and this alone makes a return to full time education impractical. This lead me in no time at all to the Open University who cater quite nicely for the likes of me. It takes a while but I one thing I don't lack is time, there are various structures and routes to go through but 5-6 years seems to be the norm. At this rate you submit one piece of a work a month, with the odd month off here and there.

And so and then, onward in the depths of question 2 "What should I study?" For those who are not aware when I went to uni the first time I was enrolled to study Chemistry. This ruled out Chemistry right off the bat! I am not terrible at maths, but there comes a point somewhere reasonably early on in calculus that my brain shuts down waves a little white flag and starts contemplating monkeys. Cute little fellas with a fez, a waste coat, a cigar and a mini tank to ride around in.... Ahem.... Back on topic. After discounting the sciences that I feel involve to much maths and biology for having little interest in the subject I thought it best to take a couple of days out and consider what I have been interested in. Two things that sprang to mind straight away, computers and current affairs. I don't really want to study computers for me it really is a good fun hobby for the most part. I like to know how they work to a point and then as with maths my brain buggers off into the middle distance and point blank refuses to have any more information input. With this in mind my addiction to current affairs came to the fore. I considered media studies, I'm not proud of it but it was clean slate time... The thing with it is that although I suck up some considerable amount of it I don't really like the media and don't much care how it works. I like ideas and systems that can be bent and manipulated, I like politics, trying to filter out the grains of truth in that bullshit filled world fills a fair few hours each week. I like philosophy, it seeks to provide a methodology for understanding things. I love the madness of some of the ideas "What's a bed?" keeps me going to this day. When I was at uni the first time around I did a module called "Political Economics", it was my favourite one. There's this economic idea called Pareto efficiency which once again I think about and look into regularly.

I want to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics handily it appears the OU agree with me that these 3 topics are closely related.

Once I settled of this as worthy of some proper research I had some questions, how do the tutorials work? How much is on-line? How much money will you expect me to part with? Turns out that they had an open day at Reading Library yesterday which I motored on down to. The answers were pleasing, it's all very affordable, there's plenty of on-line options and the tutorials are well spaced. So I registered for module one earlier on today.

It's going to be a long old slog but I expect to enjoy it and at the end my CV will be a little bit shinier than it was before.