I have always enjoyed studying. Call me a perennial student. When I took six months maternity leave following the birth of my first son I thought it would be the perfect time to start a Masters degree. I’d been thinking about it for a while and for some reason assumed I’d have all the time in the world when I was twiddling my thumbs on leave. Yes I really did believe that’s how it would be.
Clearly it was my first child and I was clueless about what was ahead.
My son was born in November so I was pregnant when I applied to start my Masters degree in the first semester of the following year. I was so happy when I was accepted. I completed my undergraduate degree six years earlier and I was keen to get back in there.
Shortly after my son was born I started to climb walls. Not because it was easy, but because not working was so foreign to me. I needed to stimulate my mind.
I’ll never forget the day I enrolled in my course. My son was almost four months old and I took him along in a baby pouch. He was happy hanging there, while I raced from one building to the next to choose classes, get booklists and pay fees.
As I was standing in one of the many lines, a woman approached me and said, “I really admire what you’re doing”. Her comment took me by surprise. It was the first time that I had stopped to consider what it was that I was about to do. As I looked around I realized I was the only person in the vicinity with a baby in tow. I studied the class timetable. It was a Masters degree that I was signing on for. The degree of difficulty and expectation of rigour around research would be exponentially higher than anything I had experienced prior. The commitment of hours was not insignificant.
Suddenly I wasn’t feeling so confident that I could do this. Still in the same line, I looked down at my baby’s smiling face. The stimuli of the buzzy university environment had made him extremely animated. I loved it there. He clearly did too. But he wouldn’t be able to be there with me at any other time.
I hadn’t really thought through how it might happen. How would I get to lectures and tutorials? How would I find the time to meet up for study groups? The university was a good 40 minutes drive from my home. How would I manage it?
Before I engaged in that first class, I made the decision to defer until a time when my baby was a bit older. Much as it pained me to admit I couldn’t work out how I could make it happen. I’d been a mother for about 14 weeks and it still hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to make some adjustments to my life. This would be the first big one.
Instead I bought the books and read them. If I needed stimulation during this time then I could do so at home with my child via those books. It was a satisfying compromise at the time.
The one regret I have is that I never did go back and do that degree. After that small window of opportunity the days got busier and there never seemed to be a good time. I did eventually go on to do a different course as the result of a promotion at work. But this Masters degree was focused on the sweet spot of my area of interest.
The one thing experience teaches you is that there is never a good time to take on a major project like a degree or starting a family or going for that promotion. So don’t allow yourself to be talked out of something that you feel passionate about. There’s nothing sadder than regret. If I had my time again I would have taken the risk and gone for it.
Have you ever thrown yourself into a project that you didn’t think you could manage at the time? Did it pay off?