It’s over three years since I graduated from Cardiff University in English Literature & History, and I’m about to go back for more. On Tuesday, I picked up my student card, and so I’m officially a postgraduate student. Tomorrow, I’ll be enrolling with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy for a MA in English Literature, focusing on medievalism and children’s literature.
I decided to return to academia for a number of reasons:
- Simply because I’m interested in the subject and enjoy studying!
- To enrich my own creative writing, particularly my novels.
- It opens up the possibility of maybe doing a PhD at some point in the future.
- It might help towards getting a more interesting, writing-related job, rather than just a series of fixed-term contracts doing admin.
Also, I feel I somewhat neglected my undergraduate studies for all the different activities on offer, and this is my chance to go back and make the most of the opportunity to study, in a way I probably didn’t do the first time round!
I’ll be involved with CriSP (the Christian Staff and Postgrads group), and I hope to write the occasional article for Gair Rhydd, but that will be plenty, rather than the half-a-dozen or so activities I tried to do as an undergraduate.
I’m sure it will be quite a different experience. I’m three years older (and hopefully wiser!). I’ve learned a lot from working, and I’m now a married man. And I’ll be studying not because I have to, or because it’s the done thing, or I don’t know what else to do, but because I’ve chosen to be there.
I’m really excited to have the opportunity to study again, to engage my brain and read loads of books, to think deeply about literature and the questions it raises. I’m also very grateful to my wife Bev for being so supportive of me in it – she’ll be the one paying the bills this year! It’s a great privilege to be able to spend another year learning, studying and thinking, and I intend to make the most of it.