Posts Tagged ‘university’
The Next Three Years
People have been giving me blank stares and confused looks the past few weeks as I have announced that I have a super dooper plan for the next three years which involves a whole lot of study, both here and overseas, and no teaching.
“What?!? No teaching? But…but…you have a teaching degree! You are a teacher! The world needs teachers!”
You know what? I’m sick of doing what the ‘world’ wants so I am now off to do what I want.
“But that is awfully selfish!”
Actually no it’s not! I think it is incredibly intelligent and will make me happy. You see last year when I was teaching I felt unappreciated, used and ridiculed for the fact that I was a teacher. I was stressed out beyond belief and was having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning and functioning at an acceptable level. I was incredibly depressed and had continuous bouts of unidentifiable sickness ranging from ulcers to skin rashes. It was quite a horrible year for me.
Ben suggested that I take some time off this year.
I decided to reassess my priorities, look at what had made me happy in the past and try to focus on what I wanted my future to look like. The result was a HUGE turn around for me.
This year I have been studying music, working three casual jobs as a theatre usher and as a promo girl. I have spent every day singing, reading, learning French and watching Opera. I have cooked new and exotic meals with ingredients I didn’t even know existed before. I have gone for morning walks. I have seen snow for the first time and travelled to countries that I couldn’t have pin pointed on a map twelve months ago. Best of all, I have been incredibly happy. I have only been sick once this entire year and only for three days. I have seen and felt a difference in my manner and my outlook on life. I LOVE EVERY DAY I AM ALIVE!!!
All the changes I made this year have made me incredibly happy. Originally the plan was for this to be like a second ‘gap year’ and I would return to teaching in 2012. Looking back though, that seems like the worst decision I could make. Why go back to the unhappiness when I can continue in this new life I have created for myself?
Which brings me to now. Two weeks ago I drew up a plan for all the things I want to do and see in the next three years. It is a very long list, which I will post when I get more than a half hour break between classes and have time to type it up! In order to actually achieve these things I have to make some further changes.
The first thing to do is to sell my house.
This is a hard thing for me to do because I love my house and I love the sense of freedom, responsibility and stability it gives me. My mum said I would need it one day, well I think that day has come. If I sell my house I will be able to pay for my university fees for the next three years leaving me debt free upon graduation. That alone is a wonderful thought. It will also help me to put my first few plans into motion.
Second thing is to work less and study more.
This is hard as I am a workaholic. I don’t like to sit idle and I feel if I am not earning money then I am a constant burden to those around me and I hate that feeling. But if I want to focus on my studies than I need to commit more time to practise and research and that means creating more time for study and less for work.
Third thing is to cut back on my expenses.
I think I have been pretty good about this anyway. I usually buy the groceries with vouchers I get from online surveys. I menu plan so there is no waste at the end of the week. I buy all my clothes second hand (except underwear). I limit the use of my car and travel using public transport. I have even taken to making birthday presents instead of buying things.
With these changes I hope that the coming years will be as wonderful and rewarding as this one has been. I have had some tricky days and hard times, but the good days have been far in abundance.
In the meantime, while waiting for my house to sell, if you see me carrying a box of Freddo’s or inviting you to a fundraising event. It isn’t because I am being selfish but because I am finally following my dream and I want you to help me get there and be a part of it.
I am going to be a great singer. The journey starts here.
These last two weeks have been a real test of my self-confidence. I have had my first concert practise where I had to sing in front of other people in my course, I have had my first full run through of the show I am doing “Company” and I have been attending vocal classes with higher grade students after being invited by my singing teacher. So what has been the outcome?
Concert practice for some unknown reason terrified me. I used to have terrible stage fright when I was younger where my whole body would shake and I would be lucky to get a note to come out of my mouth. I am nowhere near that bad anymore, usually just a little shaking and some closed vowel sounds, but the thought of concert practice froze me so much to the point I couldn’t even bring myself to choose a song until the day before. The result was nothing spectacular. I thought I could have done a lot better but the feedback I got from my class mates was amazing. They were stunned, surprised and impressed with what I thought was an average performance. It did wonders for my self confidence especially in light of how nervous I was before hand. I wanted to keep on singing.
Company rehearsal was another surprise reaction for me. Again I don’t usually get nervous and certainly not at a rehearsal, but this was my first chance to perform the role of Amy for the whole show and it was the first time I had been given the opportunity in about three weeks (I am the understudy so I usually don’t get to rehearse her part). I was close to hysterical with nerves. I couldn’t concentrate on my lines or my song. I would open my mouth to sing and the words wouldn’t come out. I finished the rehearsal devastated. I wanted to go home and cry I was convinced it was so bad. Then I looked at what conditions I was facing and how I had dealt with the situation. I also listened to the feedback from cast members, the director and Ben. Sure the nerves didn’t help but in a way they did. Amy is a very neurotic character and that was exactly what I was being without the need to act.
Vocal class had been interesting. I feel completely out of place. Most people don’t know who I am and those who do only know of me, they don’t know my name or anything like that they have just seen me around the university. It was very confronting going into a class where no one knew who I was. During the class we did an exercise for confidence and it was amazing. I am going to continue using it because it made me feel great within a couple of seconds in a situation which was playing really heavily on my confidence levels.
So what have I learnt from these experiences?
- Things are never as bad as you think
- Look at what you did well
- Don’t think of mistakes as mistakes, but rather as areas for improvement
- You can’t tell what other people are thinking so don’t assume you know
- There is something good in every performance
- Use your nervous energy and put it into your performance
- Just because you don’t know their names doesn’t mean they hate you
- You can learn something new every day
I am sure there is more in those three events but I have learnt a lot and while my confidence has been beaten down and brought back up only to be beaten down again, I actually feel more confident today than I did three weeks ago. I am on an amazing journey this year to learn not just how to sing and improve my music skills but also to improve the way I view my own life and experiences.
Image taken by Ben of me at Company rehearsal post meltdown.
I know it has been a while since my last post but I’ve been very busy being a “student”! Ahh that magical state of being where you constantly find yourself broke, eating crappy food often of the two minute noodle variety and suddenly finding yourself at 4am sitting in a computer lab wondering why you didn’t start your assignment earlier.
It hasn’t been all that bad, yet. For starters I haven’t had any assignments due and I have a husband who won’t let me eat badly despite my best efforts. I have found though that I am battling a different variety of, well not really “problems”, but they aren’t pleasant.
First of all I feel really old. I am the second oldest in my course, the oldest is a Chinese exchange student who let’s face it still looks pretty young, (what is it about Asians and their ability to look fifteen until they hit their mid-forties?). There are five singers in the course, one is 16 (she is a high school student who does the course part-time), two are 17, one is 18 and then there is me sitting pretty at 27. I don’t look all that much older but it is difficult to strike up a conversation with kids whose biggest achievement to date is graduating highschool and who never seem to want to talk about anything other than their school ball or the TEE.
Second thing on the list is discipline to get down to work and study. I have made a rather elaborate timetable with break times, class time and study times all scheduled in. I even have breakfast, morning walks and showering scheduled. Think of Hermione from Harry Potter and you start to get an idea of how anal I am about schedules. It is a fantastic piece of work and would work brilliantly if I didn’t keep sabotaging myself into not doing my work. I make excuses, have naps, complain about being hungry, pretty much anything can be a distraction. I’m getting better and I do like the sense of satisfaction when I do sit down and stick to the schedule it is just still getting there for me at the moment.
At the beginning of the year I had trouble getting work that would pay regularly. I worked but some of those jobs are yet to pay me (yes I know this is ridiculous). As a result I spent most of January living off credit. I am now paying off my credit cards as well as paying the new bills and as a result I now have very little money to do anything else. Work is starting to pick up now but it is that lag which is killing me. I especially hate this because I try to use my credit cards as little as possible.
It is also weird getting used to catching public transport every day. I purposely did not buy a parking permit for university so I would have further encouragement to not use my car this year. For one thing a parking permit costs $75 which I don’t have at the moment, and if I was to drive to uni without one I would either have to pay for parking by the hour or get there at 7am to get one of the free parking bays which usually fill up by 7:30am. When I was working at the school last year I tried to catch public transport as much as possible but there were days when I just couldn’t be bothered so I would sleep in and drive to school. Now I don’t have that option, if I want to drive to uni and have it not coast me a fortune I have to get up even earlier.
All in all though this whole student thing is pretty good. I am enjoying the course more than I thought I was going to. I have started to talk to people and hopefully make some new friends even if they are seventeen and can’t come to the pub with me yet. If I can just get over these tiny little “un-problems” I am having at the moment then everything will be even sweeter. It is going to be an amazing year.
Image by FightHIVinDC (flickr)
There are million of posts around about how to survive student life. The problem with these posts is that most of them are aimed at 17-18 year olds who are attending university for the first time and have no idea what the big bad world is like. They are usually full of sage advice like “stay at home as long as you can” or “get a part time job, bar work is usually a favourite of the university student”, but what happens when you are in my shoes and are attending university at a more mature age. You have been out into the world, you have had the well paying job and now you have to readjust to being the poor student again probably with a few extra debts (or in the case of my friend who has also gone back this year, dependants) now in tow.
- Where can you afford to live?
Having somewhere cheap and easy to live is probably the first thing you want to sort out. Some things to consider is location to the university, price, space and transport. You may find an amazingly cheap place to rent but it is forty minutes from the uni by car. The money you are saving on accommodation is going on parking permits, car maintenance, petrol and parking fines for those days when there simply wasn’t anywhere to park. I have a house of my own, but it is financially better for me to have someone else live in it and for me to live somewhere else.Do the math and figure out what your best option is.
- Use the time you have wisely.
Where I live at the moment is 45 minutes from the university via public transport. This is not a bad distance. The important thing is that I can use this time to get some work done. I am currently learning French in addition to my university studies so I use this time to go over work I am learning in my French class. That is an hour and half a day I have found to practise which if I was driving would be wasted listening to talk back radio. Plus student fares on public transport are ridiculously cheap in comparison to adults.
- Be nice to the cafeteria staff and the librarians
Something I learnt while working in a high school was always be nice to two people and you can get anything you want, canteen ladies and librarians. Think about what these two people control.
There were many times both when I attended university a couple of years back and while working in high schools, that I forgot my lunch and had no money. If you have been nice to the canteen ladies in the past they will usually let you have something if you promise to pay them tomorrow or in some circumstances they will feed you for free. They also control things like microwaves. I used to love the looks on other students faces when I would appear with a hot lunch I had brought from home cold and had heated up by the canteen staff while they were struggling with half warmed bein marie spaghetti. Be nice to lunch ladies and they will be nice to you.
Same goes for librarians. If you need a book and others keep getting it before you have a chance the librarians are the only ones who can recall the book for you and prevent anyone else getting to it before you can. These staff also control things like book fines and can easily wipe them off for you if you ask nice enough.
- Use your library
The library at the university I am attending and I am sure the same goes for most big universities is filled with things other than books. There are CDs you can borrow and listen to, you can watch films and sometimes borrow them too. You will never need to go to the movie theatre again because you will never get through everything that is in the library and most of it is quality stuff.
- Work
Well duh of course you need to work how else are you going to pay the bills? A lot of people think that the only way they can get through being a poor uni student is doing work in exchange for cash. There are a lot of other ways to help your money go further.
I belong to three different online survey sites. I have found these three to be the quickest, easiest and most rewarding. Currently I probably complete three surveys a week which take me about 20 minutes all together and this is usually during time when I am chilling and not really paying attention. About once a month I have enough credits to get a $25 voucher for Coles, Woolworths or Hoyts. That will usually pay for a weeks groceries or for both Ben and I to go to the movies on a Tuesday night. Not bad for time I would otherwise waste.
I have also found that people, like friends and family usually have shitty jobs they don’t want to do which they will gladly pass on to you and give you a meal, complete a hitty job of yours or give you money in exchange.
- Get your friends to feed you
It is always cheaper to eat at home as opposed to going out. If a friend invites you around to dinner, accept every time. First of all it is a meal you don’t have to cook or pay for, and secondly you get to spend time with your friends. I know of friends of mine who have a standing date with a friend for dinner every week, that is one meal a week they don’t have to worry about.
Alternatively if you know a couple of you and your friends are in the same boat take it in turns to cook dinner. It gives you a break and it saves you money. Making large quantities of food is always cheaper than cooking for one.
- Clothes are still good second-hand
This isn’t a new idea it has been around for a while now, but I didn’t realise that some second-hand clothes stores regularly have half price days. Find out what days these are and you can get your cheap clothes even cheaper. I also find that these clothing stores are much more interesting than the full price ones.
Even better, if a friend is throwing stuff out ask if you can have a look first. If you are handy with a sewing machine you will save even more because size is no longer an issue. Thank you mum for teaching me how to sew!
There are definitely more things out there, I am just discovering some ideas as I go along. Some are new ideas, like the online surveys, while others have been pretty ingrained in my life for some time now. I’m enjoying figuring things out as I go along.
The last couple of nights I have been having trouble getting to sleep at a reasonable hour. I have been sleeping lightly, often waking at the slightest movement from either Ben or one of the cats sleeping in the bed next to me. I usually go to bed at a reasonable hour but have been finding that being in bed is not leading to the desired pattern of sleep. Even now as I write this it is over three hours since I went to bed.
What is going on?
Why can’t I get to sleep?
What is plaguing my mind so much that I can’t get it to switch off?
It seems lately that I have nothing much to worry about. I am looking forward to year of studying singing, traveling to France and spending a lot more time at home with Ben. Could it be that now that I am reaching a time of near perfection in my life that my brain just can’t handle it? Seeing no imminent threat has it gone into high alert waiting for the next trouble to come looming over the horizon?
What am I waiting for? I am incredibly happy but I keep unconsciously sabotaging myself. For example I spent an hour today looking for a job. Why?
1. I don’t need a job. I have a casual job already working in a theatre and I love it!
2. I don’t have my timetable for university yet so I don’t even know when I would be free to extra work.
3. My tenant in my house has just signed a 12 month lease on the rental agreement so I don’t really need any more money than I am already making.
The only reasonable solution I can come up with to all this is that my brain can not handle that everything is going along really well at the moment. I am required to sit still for a couple of weeks while I am on holidays waiting for the course to start. Instead of taking that time to relax my brain is taking that time to cause havoc.
Well no more!
I am taking back my brain and getting back to sleep.
I WILL BE MORE AWARE OF MY THOUGHTS AND WHEN I TRY TO SELF SABOTAGE I WILL MAKE A CONCEITED EFFORT TO COUNTERACT THAT ATTACK!!!
And as a back up plan I can always write on here. Writing seems to get my mind off of these things.
With that in mind…goodnight!
Image by Frankincensy (Flickr)
