Common Sense v SFE: The Rematch

Firstly, I feel obliged to point out that yes, it is quite clearly TMA week. We are officially in the one week of the month where I literally need to scrub the floors/repaint the window sills/look for flights online/write a new blog post. Not to be immodest but my ability to procrastinate is, I feel, worthy of its own special award, a Procrastination FA(hons) with Distinction. At this rate it may possibly be my first and only (hons). In keeping with the blogging about blogging vortex for a minute I'd also like to point that after a very nervous email from me the lovely editors at OU Platform have decided to add this blog onto the list on their Blogs homepage which I'm genuinely chuffed and excited about. I feel like a real official person now. I'm on the grid.

Outside of OU work (and actual work) we've had a pretty terrible week all round in our house, lots of bad news and a pretty scary injury have made May my new least favourite month. At this point I'd be quite happy to crawl back into my quilt and wait until June (maybe even July), but sadly life goes on and while we've made time to stop and think about the what's happening the sad reality is that the mundane chores in life still need done. The washing up and the hovering don't care if you've had some bad news and the food shop doesn't care how stressed you are, life's minor inconveniences go on no matter what and unfortunately the dreaded Student Finance application is another one of those things that needs to be done whether its appropriate or not.
I think after last years trauma of being told my NI number was wrong (my disproportionate overtime tax payments would imply it wasn't) and the absolute hassle of having to send in a massive form and 2 separate lots of supporting evidence I was something dangerously close to excited when I realised that as a continuing student (scary thought), all I had to do was log on and apply. Simples.
Obviously me being me and SFE being well..... something I feel may be inappropriate for a blog it wasn't even nearly as clear as I thought it would be. After spending an hour earlier in the week clicking between the OU site and the Direct Gov site which had somehow locked me in a continuous loop of simply referring between in each other I eventually gave up and decided to give them a call on my day off today.  A full 40 minutes later (about 25 of it on hold) an incredibly nice and helpful but fairly confused sounding guy on the phone had eventually managed to explain that full time OU courses aren't funded by a Full Time Tuition Fee Loan but that given the relatively low cost of OU study a Part Time Tuition Fee Loan would pay enough to cover 120 credits in a year. Now while I fully appreciate a fee loan is a fee loan and that it's the same money any way you dress it up there's something about this I feel vaguely offended by.
While I'm 100% sure SFE rules are not made up solely to offend people and that there is clearly some kind of rationale behind this the feeling I got from it is that even if you are studying at full time pace, doing 120 credits a year at a university level because you are doing the study at home you're somehow considered to not be working as hard. I completely understand this is not the reason, I understand the reasoning will have been based purely on financial statistics and that really, in the grand scheme of things, there are far bigger problems in the world but for some reason this has really bugged me.
I live in Newcastle, 8 months of the year we cannot move for students from 2 massive universities and while I'm sure there are a percentage of them who work incredibly hard towards achieving their goals a good 75% of them are there to get lashed and have 10% off Topshop. So quite frankly the fact that they are deemed to be somehow studying harder or more intensely than OU student absolutely infuriates me. From the OUSA Forums, Facebook groups and Platform groups I've spoke to some amazing people, people who both work and study full time, people who study full time despite serious debilitating illnesses and young people who study full time with OU because it fits in around their commitments to care for family members. I know that either way its the same money we all get but I just feel like for those people it would be a nice confirmation of their achievements if they could log on to the SFE website and see 'Full Time Loan' , that it would probably confirm what they already know: that we work at least as hard as brick uni students and we deserve at least the same recognition.

Rant aside I've finally got my application in so it's now a case of keeping my fingers crossed and hoping it all goes through smoothly this year. And with that out of my system I'm off to finally crack on with TMA 04. Or to have some wine. Either or.

Passing grades, pointless jobs and politics.

I've been thinking quite a lot at the minute about what will always be, in my head, the Butterfly Effect. And yes, Ashton Kutcher is wonderful in that film and, yes I cry like a little girl every time but I don't mean the amazing 2004 film I actually mean the theory behind it. That we're all just the summation of a million tiny choices, accidents and decisions made over the course of our lives that have somehow brought us to this point, and that any minor change to this would inevitably change the people we are and the lives we have. Pop culture theory at its best people.
But genuinely, I tend (as anyone who follows me on Twitter will confirm) to whinge on about life, about my boring job, lack of finances and general inability to just make the best of things. The more I think about it though the more I'm coming round to the idea that these things are firstly, very minor first world pains in the grand scheme of things, and secondly even ignoring point one these are things that shouldn't be whinged about. If every shitty choice, bad decision, poor judgement call and moment of laziness are what brought me here then they've all in effect also given me every good part too. Every minor victory when I get a good TMA result back, every afternoon off I can squish in with Little Miss, every night off staying up watching shit TV with the Mr are all experiences that don't exist without days wishing my life away in work and sitting drinking more cups of tea than I ever thought humanly possible and trying to write these damn essays.
I know I'm rambling but I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't know when things are good if they've never been bad. Or as my thigh tattoo quite eloquently puts it: 'Smooth Seas make for Poor Sailors'.  So I'm just going to suck it up, make the best of the present and get through it to hopefully make myself a better future.

ANYWAY now that that's over with on with the actual OU blogging. DD101 is coming on a treat, really enjoying the course book, it's a surprisingly interesting subject and I've so far managed to avoid a total crash and burn on the TMA's to date (*touch wood*). The only thing that's been bothering me was the decision to go part time at first. Although it has been a great way to get used to studying I'm really not keen on the idea of sitting around twiddling my thumbs from October to February when my first level 2 module was due to start. This got me thinking about the idea of changing courses. As I've mentioned before I'm currently studying towards my Politics, Philosophy, Economics BA which was expected to take around 6 years, when I decided that I really want to step it up to full time I started looking a which courses DD101 counts towards which could be studied as a full time course, this took me on a trip around pretty much every social sciences prospectus the OU does before eventually bringing me back full circle to Combined Social Sciences (Politics) BA. Thinking about it now it seems like the obvious choice and to be honest there are a maximum of 2 modules different so it is 100 % the sensible obvious choice and once the decision was made I realised that to be fair politics was the main subject that attracted me to P,P,E in the first place so you would assume this would be an easy decision. It wasn't. Not even a little bit.
I spent a full 10 days of my life obsessively scribbling out module start dates, course planners, career paths, studying any 'Post Grad Employment' stats I could find and generally having a bit of a nervous breakdown about the whole thing. I finally gave up last Thursday and decided that seen as I already have a job (awful or not), and I'm quite frankly studying 90% for my own peace of mind and interest I might as well go where my interest is and in the end it seemed the most sensible choice.
A bit of a let down after this whole scenario was my phone call to Learner Support which I felt was a major life changing moment which essentially involved a (polite and helpful) woman at OU umming and ahhing about whether I could go full time, whether DD101 would count towards the new course (it's the same module?) and eventually saying that someone would have to phone me back in a few days.
All in all not the momentous phone call I'd built it up to be but then again when something's built up that much it's never quite going to live up. The moral of the story is done believe your brains hype kids.

And on that note I'm off to sob into my TMA04 notes.