Just a quick note to start with- I’ve backdated some of these posts to roughly when they happened. I started this blog on 16th August 2014, but there’s a few bits I want to write about that have happened already. So here we go…
April 2014. I’ve been single now for nearly 2 months and for the most part I am pretty happy about it. Over the last 12 years I’ve spent most of my life with someone. It’s a way of life I have gotten used to, but now I am on my own again, I am finding it quite liberating not having someone else to consider with everything I do. My job is going well, I am soon to start a new role as an Assistant Project Manager in the NHS.
Since quitting college back in 1995, I have spent most of my career in retail, moving from one job to another as life permitted, never spending more than a couple of years in one job. In 2010 I finally had my fill of arsehole customers and Head Offices screaming at us to wring every last penny would could from everyone who walked into the shop. I needed a change of direction. I ended up taking a part-time job in the Pathology lab at my local hospital and I loved it immediately! Less than a year later I won a promotion to the Blood Transfusion lab as a Senior Assistant Healthcare Scientist and spent 3 happy years there.
There was often plenty of talk about being funded for a degree in Biomedical Sciences, something I was very keen on, but due to budget restraints as a result of the economic downturn, this was never to be. If I wanted a degree, I had to fund it myself. Eventually, my new role came along, which would take me out of the lab environment, and potentially along a different path.
This gave me something to think about. I am now in a position where I can forge a career in the NHS and stay within the Pathology Department (now called the Department of Laboratory Medicine), but with the new job, I began to question whether doing a degree in Biomedical Sciences, and finding a university that offered a distance learning course, was actually the right choice.
I think I would make a good Biomedical Scientist. I enjoy the environment, but I wondered that, if after 4 years already in the lab, plus a further 4 during the length of a degree (minimum), would I be longing for a change of direction again after best part of a decade? Plus, now I am leaving the lab and turning to a world of project management, would a degree in Biomedical Science prove restrictive at the end of it?
So I thought long and hard about it. In the end, I decided to enroll on a degree in Psychology with the Open University starting in October. Why? Well I already have a year’s worth of Psychology education through the ACCESS course I did back in 2002-03 and I thoroughly enjoyed it (not to mention I got the best marks in Psychology out of the three subjects I took), and also I think that as Psychology is such a wide-ranging subject, it will give me the most flexibility when it comes to furthering my career later down the line.
I won’t now become a Biomedical Scientist, but that’s ok. There are many other options available to me, still within Laboratory Medicine (or not, who knows!?), some of which I may not have even imagined yet.
So here I go, I have registered with the OU and have elected to study Psychology. Now, which module do I choose?
OU Student Life 