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.
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