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Working by day and learning by night

lord henry strikes back

08:51 / 21.07.05

Come September (lordie it's getting close now) both Doozy and I will start night classes. We will both be working full time (love to be students again but money, bloody money...) attending classes a couple of times a week and trying to fit in some study time. Do any of you lovely 'lithers have any handy hints on how best to balance all of this? How to pass without going nuts?

09:38 / 21.07.05

I'm a part-time research student, and am supposed to be working half-time on my job and half-time on my thesis. Ha ha. In order to make ends meet, I have ended up taking on a great deal of extra paid work - so much that I have been at work late several nights a week ever since January, and still have to take holiday to get any academic work done whatsoever. This is frustrating, as I end up getting home at nine or later, eating, and not getting anything done before my eyes start shutting...

I would say that financial security is absolutely vital. Money is a huge source of stress, so I think it is good that you are both continuing employment. Your tutors will understand the pressures that this causes. It's also good that you are both doing it because you will be able to be mutually supportive - I think the need to spend vast amounts of time with one's head down can put a strain on relationships. It's really important to keep plenty of time for yourselves, even though the guilty feelings 'I should be doing work now' are quite strong... you need time to cook properly, do the housework, get out of the house, etc. Otherwise you can go potty and get very miserable.

So I would advocate setting a basic timetable and trying to stick to it. But it should be flexible enough that, if you fancy going to the pub at a 'study' time, you can rearrange things to suit. Allocate a number of hours each week to it and try to make sure you do those hours (I am really, really rubbish at this but it is still a good idea). And it is worth remembering that, when studying, one always feels as though there is so much more one should be doing, no matter how much time there is. So don't strain because you 'feel you should be doing more'. There is always more you could do, but if you try to do it all you won't succeed. No point making yourselves ill!

I am really bad at all this and should learn to take my own advice.

10:18 / 21.07.05

Rather sadly, I don't think we are going to be very financially secure - living in London rather consumes our salaries, and we're going to have to cough up regular fee installments/loan repayments on top (unless the AHRB suddenly has a heart and gives me a fortune to squander and squitter away on wackiness like fees).

Timetabling sounds like a plan. Trouble is, I'm not sure how to fit in my 35 hours of studying around my 35 hours of work. How many hours are there in a week again? I am afraid...

10:34 / 21.07.05

By 'financially secure' I mean 'not being totally penniless' - I wasn't thinking of 'able to order takeaway every night of the week and spend a fortune in HMV every Friday'. Just being able to pay the bills and go out once in a while and so on. I take it you're doing something like a Birkbeck MA? You may find you're eligible for Access to Learning Funds as well (though they have a requirement that you have to have applied for a CDL - we're hoping that they will waive this soon as it really prevents people applying for it - frexample I won't apply as my credit rating is so shit).

If you're doing part-time study you should be looking at 17.5 hours a week, not 35.

11:07 / 21.07.05

Have you thought about recuding your working hours? How would your workplace[s] going be about changing your hours to suit your timetable?

11:09 / 21.07.05

(I'm being daft and I'm doing it full time - in the evenings - not part time. I may regret this decision, but I am impatient to acquire wisdom.)

You're probably right, in that we'll be financially secure enough. I think we've just grown a bit accumstomed to our little luxuries and will have to start cutting back! How I shall miss ebay...

I don't think I'm eligible for a CDL because I'm not vocational. I'm just pointless and highbrow and profoundly unnecessary. And *definitely* far too young to be a mature student at a mature place like Birkbeck.

11:32 / 21.07.05

Well - I know several people who work full-time (not in the way that I do in bits and bobs - they have full-time jobs of the office variety) and study part-time, and that seems to be a struggle, so I think you should be aware that doing full-time and full-time is going to be a real slog. I'm sure you know that anyway, but... be prepared!

11:33 / 21.07.05

though Birkbeck if anywhere will be good at helping you deal with it.

12:35 / 21.07.05

Are your respective courses in any way linked to your current or even a future career? If so, you should be able to get a CDL, especially as you will already be working. I know there are rules but the banks are really only interested in whether you can pay it back.

10 years ago I was in a dead end office job having shelved any chance of using my first degree. I found a new course I wanted to do (a part time distance taught PG Dip scheduled to take 3 years to complete) and took out a CDL to fund the first years fees. I'd get home from work at say 5pm, relax for an hour and have tea and then attempt to do 2 hours study. I found it important to have the relaxing time before study and also, not to study right up to the time you wanted to go to bed.
Fortunately, the amount of time I was told to devote to study was completely over-estimated. I reckon I did about a third of what was "required". It was only at assignment or exam time that I'd approach anything near what I was told to do.
It finally paid off too. Nearing the end of my course I got the job I wanted in London and after 4 years had tripled the salary I'd previously enjoyed.

It's all about your motivation as I'm sure you know!

13:34 / 21.07.05

Kit-Kat - I know, I'm a giddy fool. In my interview, the lovely Birkbeck people discovered that I worked full-time, went all quiet, then desperately started struggling to find comforting things to say along the lines of 'I'm sure it can be done...'

They also said I can swap to part-time if I want to.

I hope they're as nice as they seemed at Birkbeck. I need them to be nice. And sympathetic. It would be pleasant if they could keep telling me that I am brilliantly gifted, too, although I may need to pay extra for that.

Brunner - my course isn't linked to a career at all, really, unless the vague possibility that one day I could do a phd counts as a career. Which it doesn't. Not even to me.

13:40 / 21.07.05

Kit-Cat-Club is right, I work 35 to 40 hours a week and do graduate school in the evenings,
I suck at keeping to a timetable but it is extremely important to try. Your lives will be happier in the long run.
I also agree that it's even more important to take some breaks and relax, the school work will always be there and there is always more to be done, so before you get too stressed, take a break. Go to the pub or whatever.
Sometimes you can work too much and not end up getting anything done because your head is being pulled in too many directions.
But in any case good luck, i hope it goes well for you.

Psi-L is working in hell

17:27 / 21.07.05

I started off doing a Birkbeck MSc full-time, alongside a full-time job and I managed to take the full-time number of modules required in my first year...the bit I struggled with and that casued me to drop down to part-time at the end of my first year was the dissertation. I just found that I didn't have the time on top of all the modules to do a piece of independent research. So I spent the whole of my second part-time year, just doing that, which worked quite well really...felt a lot less pressured, plus I had no actual classes to go to. I did of course end up having to pay another year of half fees though, which was not so great.

That's not particularly encouraging sorry! Not saying of course that you both might be better at it than me. I'm notoriously bad at being very disciplined with my time...but agree with Kit-Cat, that trying to set yourself a timetable is a good start. I put aside my saturday afternoons, and that was when I left my house and went and sat in the library to work, away from all distractions at home! This also meant that apart from the evenings I had classes I had some nights off in the week to relax.

Also it is worth telling your lecturers about the pressure you'll be under doing it full-time, as they are used to giving a certain amount of lee-way with deadlines at Birkbeck...I've lectuered at there since, and was told by the course organiser just to accept that my students jobs did take priority over their work, so I was generally happy to give extensions etc if the students said that they'd got a heavy few weeks at work coming up.

I did manage to get a bank loan to pay for fees too, so agree with everyone else it is worth looking into. I had to get a letter from someone on the course that said how vital the course was to my career plans...which I think if memory serves just said how vital the degree was to my plans to go on to do a PhD, which is a career of sorts...