At seventeen I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Having just returned from a solo birthday trip to volunteer on a reserve in South Africa, all I knew I wanted to do was travel. So when it came to applying to universities, I looked abroad and in doing so I found liberal arts courses. Courses that allowed you to pick and choose different courses and electives rather than sticking to just one topic. Unfortunately, these courses either came with the ridiculous expenses of American colleges or the requirement of a maths A-Level in the Netherlands, an A-level I had not completed and wouldn’t be able to. So, after hitting a wall with my interview with the University of Amsterdam I decided to take some time off school and travel again, back to South Africa on a two-month trip traveling along the coast from Cape Town to Durban.
The trip was a refreshing change of pace after high school, travelling around with strangers, volunteering on reserves and in a youth care centre, even fixing a house in a township and talking to the women there of the political landscape of South Africa. The trip couldn’t last forever though and after I’d returned, I still had an overwhelming urge to travel and a broad range of interests. That’s when I found the Open Degree at the Open University in England. A course that allowed me to pick different modules each year and a university where all the teaching occurred online, allowing me to move in and out of the country as I liked. So, I signed up quickly and began my new education the February after I’d finished school. I made use of the freedom of travel and registered on an au-pairing site. It turns out the lifetime experience that comes with having a childminder as a mother and a house that is constantly full of children puts you at a great advantage as an au pair and I quickly found a family in Switzerland to move in with just after Christmas. Starting university and a new job all at once was slightly daunting but I was excited to bask in the elegance of studying whilst abroad, learning Swiss German and exploring the snow-dusted city of Zürich with a multi-cultural group of other au-pairs. The subjects in the first year were broader and simpler than the following years and so I chose to study Science and the Social Sciences. There’s an option with Open University to study part time, only doing one module a year, about 16–18 hours a week. But I was fully up for the challenge of a 32–36 hour course load, even if I was doing it alongside a 35 hour work week. I found the first year quite easy, more of an introduction to higher education learning itself than higher education content. The challenge was the self-motivation and self-organisation rather than the courses themselves, at least for me and mine. My courses provided me with textbooks along with an online platform with videos, questions, quizzes, texts, computer marked assignments and longer assessments. Other than the assessments, there was no-one to check what I had or hadn’t done and it would have been quite easy to skip through it and have just made it up when it came to the assignments but I persevered and of course got more out of the course by really seeing it through. Thinking back I know I found it easy, only a small step above what I’d learnt in high school but looking through notebooks I found the other day with calculations for the velocity of rockets, I realise it really was rocket science to the uneducated eye, so I suppose that’s a testament to the education that I received.
Deciding that it wasn’t enough of a challenge by itself though I decided to travel again, having finished my six month contract in Switzerland, I returned home for a couple weeks before heading out to Connecticut to meet a friend I’d met the second time round in South Africa and hadn’t seen in almost a year. Whilst still studying I stayed with her family for a couple weeks, the time difference between the UK and the US making no difference to my studying. From there we took a weekend trip up to Canada before we set out on our mammoth trip across the country. We took the greyhound from Connecticut to Colorado, which was nowhere near as charming as we’d imagined it would be. The 3 am stops, the random break-downs in the middle of nowhere, the strangers waking me from a NyQuil induced sleep shouting about how they were going to jail. All the while I kept studying and planning for the trip ahead of us. I studied through our adventures in Colorado and Utah and wrote my final assignments by greyhound bus internet and the electricity of campsite kitchens, finally handing one in after we’d managed to hitch hike our way out of Utah and down into Arizona. My tutors were forgiving as I explained I had no graph paper whilst travelling on the road and the lack of a scientific calculator didn’t seem to hold me back. I’m sure I learnt a lot from the textbooks and the work handed out to me that year, but I think I learnt more from the experiences it allowed me to have. It allowed me to work abroad, negotiating contracts and organising education around work. It allowed me to travel, a chaotic undertaking that taught me not only the significance of planning ahead but also the significance of finding a travel buddy that agrees with the former. It was a hectic trip and I’m not entirely sure how we made it through it and how I managed to complete my first year of university amidst it, but I did and I was excited for the next year.
It turned out there was a small hiccup when it came to my next year though. The Open University allows you to start your year in September or February and as I started my first year in February I had to wait until the following February to begin my second year. Although there was a plethora of choices to choose from in my first year, the selection of courses for a second year February start was fairly dismal. From my memory there were only a couple of courses related to computer sciences or accounting available, neither of which had any interest to me, so I decided to defer until September, which was a simple decision I made with the help of student support. I took the months in between to travel and au-pair again, first in Switzerland with a family that became quite controlling and very different to how they’d appeared online. It wasn’t fun living there, and I ended up making liquid meals in my room at night just to avoid them, but it did give me my first opportunity to truly quit a job. This wasn’t exactly easy considering I lived in my employers house, with no way to leave on my own but to lug a 25 kilo bag about a mile to a funicular or work out a way to find my address and book an expensive taxi to come and pick me up, again not made easier by the fact that I hadn’t been paid and spent most of the money I’d brought buying my own food. As daunting as it was though I confronted them and agreed to work for another two weeks whilst they found someone else. At the same time, I found another job and instead of returning home I made my way to France to live, again as an au-pair, on a ski resort. I took the time off university to delve into my interests, into reading, learning French, experimenting with coding, animating and researching for the education company I now work for. September rolled around quickly and after assessing my interests I signed up for a module in Politics and a module in International Development. I loved both of these topics and the work really seemed to step up. For International Development we tracked the progress of Detroit and Shanghai, looking at a range of development approaches and actors along the way. For the Politics module we assessed and compared the two political systems of the UK and the US, as well as engaging with other key political ideas and theories. Again, they came with textbooks and online platforms, the course was split into each week, with a chapter and a range of work and extended reading assigned to each. There were interactive quizzes, questions, definitions, audios, forums and videos to engage with and every now and then, generally close to the hand-in-date for an assignment, there would also be live video tutorials to allow you to talk to other students and your tutors. There were also a couple of in-person days that you could sign up to to meet your tutor and fellow students in person. All of the work, other than the assignments, could be done at your own pace and again other than the assignments it was all kind of optional if you wanted it to be. I never did attend the in-person meetings because I’d already made my mind up that I was going abroad again.
Again, I went back to South Africa, I really do love this country. This time I went to do a FGASA (Field Guiding) Course. Three months in total, spent between the school and reserves where we wouldn’t have internet or even any kind of electrical devices at all sometimes, even watches were off limits. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, completing both courses and also making the most out of my time there, so I got organised. I swapped out my textbooks for digital downloads so I wouldn’t have to lug them halfway across the world, and I got ahead on my work. By the time I left for South Africa I was already a couple of months ahead with my work. As I said before, other than the assignments, everything can be done at your own pace so although it takes some extra work and grit, you can get quite far ahead if you want, which comes in handy if you run into an issue in your personal life. Whilst completing the FGASA course we’d spend a week or two at a time out in one of the two reserves. In one we weren’t allowed any electronics, there was only one emergency phone allowed by the guides and no-one wanted to crack it out of its case even when we did run into an emergency. In the other we had electricity and limited internet, but I chose not to take my computer there, mostly out of concern that my tent could be stormed by warthog or monkeys (it’s happened before). This created a dilemma though when it came to one assignment that required me to work with a group of other students to collaborate on a project. On the days that we were supposed to be collaborating and possibly skyping I was set to be on the reserve with patchy internet and very limited time. I didn’t want to miss out on either so I contacted my tutors in both settings and my university tutor helped me figure out a way I could still do most of the assignment and assured me that I could sacrifice the 5% of the grade that would have come from my collaboration. This year was harder than the first, both in the content and assessments but also in the organisation it required. Both the university course and the FGASA course had strict deadlines to things that I had to figure out how to work around. I had to plan to figure out how much time I’d have before and after expeditions to the reserves before university assessment deadlines were due, made even harder by the varying deadlines of the two different modules. But I made it through and finished the FGASA with flying colours before it was time to head home and start revising for my exams. For both of these modules I had an exam at the end of the year, which of course had to be done in person but was arranged to be at a venue in my area. It wasn’t always easy to fit all of the work in, sometimes I had to omit reading the extended reading or forgo the trips down the South African coast with friends and it wasn’t easy to motivate myself to do university reading between the 6 am birding walk and the 9 am class, but in the end it really instilled in me a good working ethic and self-motivation.
I carried this self-motivation into my third year where I chose to study Environmental Policy in an International Context alongside Crime and Justice. Both courses were incredible and really helped me hone my interests. I chose to stay home and focus on both my university studies and the video editing work I do. It was just as well though because my third year was much harder than my previous two and the spread of coronavirus meant I would have had to end my trip anyway. Tutors seemed to have much higher expectations in the third year and the assignments required more research and time. For the environmental policy module, we were required to write a policy brief which was a really interesting change to the normal essay assignments and gave me a taste of what it would be like to work in policy, a key area of interest of mine. This module would have ended in an extended assignment where I would have had to write an essay on an environmental problem of my choice. The essay question would have been set but the problem would have been mine to choose and then for the second part I would have written a policy briefing related to that environmental problem. Unfortunately, this assignment was cancelled due to coronavirus, but it would have been great to have another crack at a policy briefing now that we’d had more experience and feedback on writing one. My other module, Crime and Justice, had an exam as the final assessment which was also cancelled but the final assignment before that was a much longer essay of our choice that we had been preparing for throughout the year. For this module though, it was completely our own choice of what to write about. Of course, there was a word limit and it had to relate to one of the topics we’d studied which had ranged from cybercrime to state terror to conflict resolution to human rights. In total we covered 12 kinds of crime and justice and I loved each and every topic but for the assessment I decided to combine my two modules slightly and focus on environmental crime. I chose to reflect upon the limited scope of criminal justice and how this led to the ignorance of crimes such as ecocide and environmental damage which are increasingly important in our globalised world. I argued for a transition to a more international criminal justice system, both in the values and perspectives that it reflected as well as the ground that it covered. It’s a shame that the final assessment and exam were cancelled in the end, but this was out of the universities hands and they tried as best as they could to deliver us grades that imitated our predicted grades.
It may have not been the most conventional education and it definitely had its ups and downs but overall, it’s been a wonderful experience to complete such an open and broad education whilst travelling around the world. I did have concerns that the education I’d receive wouldn’t be as high quality as other institutions but there’s no doubt that this course pushed me, and it taught me a lot more in other aspects. I see it now in the ways that I plan my days, in the ways that I have continued to learn online, completing various online courses since I handed in that last assignment. It gave me a great work ethic and beyond that it gave me the space to make the most of some incredible opportunities abroad which in turn taught me a lot too. There are of course downfalls, namely the lack of socialising. For many, university is an experience that goes beyond the lecture hall and you don’t get that whilst learning online. Still it meant I got to travel and meet people that way and in my final year there was a WhatsApp group for one of my courses which was great for support. The university also tries to get students involved in a student body and holds jobs fairs, both online and in-person. Also, I still ended up writing for a university zine as a friend from high school reached out to me and asked me to write for his. All in all it was a wonderful experience and it really is true that you get out what you put in, an open education at an online institution really allows for both ends of the spectrum, but if you’re willing to put the work in, you’re definitely bound to be rewarded for it.
