I am currently enrolled in three subjects/classes this semester as part of an 48 unit coursework masters degree via distance/online delivery at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.
Each subject is equal to six units – thus, I require eight subject passes in total to qualify for the award.
Unfortunately, I’ve only managed to complete one subject so far – way back in 2006. So there’s still seven left to go.
Alas, I’m not really sure this is what I want to do with my life.
I’ve really struggled with the whole distance education thing – it all feels so unauthentic, isolated, and, dare I say, unfufilling. It just doesn’t feel like higher education. The passion, the struggle, and the raw lust for knowledge and intellectual adventure just isn’t there any more – and that worries me no end. My mind is getting lazy and has effectivly become disengaged – some would say unhinged – from society. I long for the days when I could attend lectures on a daily basis, had access to million-book libraries and regularly had face to face contact with teachers and students who genuinely cared about something greater than economy – greater than themselves.
...or perhaps this is just my idealism rearing its ugly, pistol whipped face again.
I wasted many of the opportunities presented to me in my youth, and essentially flushed my undergraduate experience down the fucking toilet. Through a combination of depression and pure bloody cowardice I became a shell of what I had once hoped to become. Perhaps part of me desperately wants to relive those years again, this time in the sun, rather than on the floor of a seldom cleaned rented dorm room with more fungus than your average mushroom plantation.
It seems that a degree these days is about everything other than the learning. Status. Money. Friends. Of course I want these things…? Actually, just what in the hell do I want?
I don’t really know anymore. I’m just drifting through life these days, the only end is some vague, detestably arrogant aspiration to somehow save the universe.
What the FUCK am I doing? I’m 27 and need to get my act together.
What’s worse, is that this MA leads precisely nowhere; It won’t qualify me for PhD candidature – or even a research masters – I don’t even get to write an original thesis. I’ve always dreamed of writing a thesis. Contributing, in some small way to humanity’s accumulated pool of knowledge.
I want to do something lasting, something significant, something people find valuable.
Clearly, I need to think some things through
