Foreign Perspectives

Although many people are plugging away with various OU courses with a view, at least in principle, to eventually acquiring a degree in the fullness of time, the long drawn out nature of OU degrees tends to make the degree itself something of a fixture.

Perhaps the biggest difference from a “normal” degree is that whereas in the course of doing a normal degree your life is largely centred around the degree and your life as a student, with the OU that’s rarely the case and over the six or seven years that most people take their lives change and the degree becomes a fixture. Let’s face it: a lot can happen over seven years (and it can take as long as 11 even following normal length courses and without breaks). Children can go right through primary school for a start and grow up saying stuff like “Daddy’s doing his French now”.

That “constant” aspect means that when things go badly in one’s life people tend not to quit their degree as you might expect but rather continue with it. I’ve known several people now who’ve lost babies or close family members yet seemingly continued on regardless. To some that might seem unfeeling but those I’ve known are continuing basically because the degree itself gives them a fixed point to hold onto and get them through whatever they’re going through in their lives.

Of course, there is the small matter of that degree at the end of the road to consider. In my experience many people simply forget about it and it can come as something of a shock to receive the little email saying that you can now accept your degree. It’s only natural really: who could really plan something with certainty that was going to take six years or more to complete? In my own case, I found that it was three years on from the point where I was saying “I’d like to speak French better” that I was at the point where I realised that a modern languages degree was a possibility for me and I’m sure that many people doing OU courses are in the same boat.

However, it’s “worse” than that because the OU let you count a very wide range of courses towards a degree and, for the most part, don’t put any time limit on acquiring a degree. Thus if you have a broad range of interests you can easily find that there are several degrees worth of courses in their prospectus that you’d be interested in. Sometimes they’ll form coherent degrees but that’s far from the case all the time. For instance, in my own case I’m notionally plugging away with a psychology degree yet I also have things like World Archaeology and Medieval to Modern History on my list of courses that I’d be interested in doing which have no relationship at all with psychology.

Put together a wide range of courses with the wide range of people who sign up for them and it’s not unknown for people to be working towards multiple degrees simultaneously. The record so far is someone who had 60 odd courses behind him amounting to several degrees but I’m sure that it’s a record that will be broken many times in the years to come. Age is no barrier either and just a few weeks ago I heard of someone in their 90s who’s now reached the point where they’ve three doctorates and are still going strong!

That’s the problem with the OU: it’s quite addictive. Although I’ve just completed a modern languages degree with them I’ve already started on a psychology degree and a few days idle skimming through the prospectus over the summer produced a list equivalent to two or perhaps three degrees worth of courses for my “short” list. It’s not that I’m explicitly planning on doing all of those but it gives me a menu to choose from at least over the next couple of years.

What prompted this little missive? Well, ’tis almost time for me to be signing up for the next course. At the moment it’s looking like it’ll be Human Biology which should make a course later on in my psychology schedule much easier to do but, more importantly, it looks like a really interesting course to do. This one’s something of a rest course for me in that it’s only a 30-pointer so should take much less time than the 60 point courses I’ve been doing for the past three years.