Where does an interest in research even come from??

Getting through A-Levels is hard.  I mean, really hard.  I still believe they are the hardest qualification young people complete on their academic journey.  Often first time living alone, paying bills, working, sixteen years old.  And there’s no blagging A-Levels, or catching a break, or a rest.  You have to continually do the slog.  If you’re a good enough writer, you can get a halfway decent score on an essay if you throw some research time at it and spend some hours focusing.  A-Levels though, they come with an exam cost, revision time, massive fear of failure (we haven’t learned to fail yet, failure is not an option!), and most of all, the knowledge that we are now On Our Own.  As a mum watching my first go through her first year at them, it gave me PTSD-style flashbacks.  And I have to admit, I didn’t cut it on my go-around.

For the first time ever, the simple fact that I was a bit clever did not magically do the trick, and I did not saunter through with the grades required for my UCAS-submitted chosen degree course at the University of Sheffield.  I left Lincoln College with two Cs and an E; perfectly acceptable grades really for many, but far below those anticipated by my tutor, and low enough to result in an interview requirement for my Archaeology degree, which of course, in sudden unexpected desperation, I failed.  Please do not mistake me, I had never gotten fantastic grades previously.  I had never bothered trying, having never really cared about school very much.  What I did have from school was a litany of reports stating that I was perfectly capable of exemplary grades, should I simply apply myself, and my own absolute self-expectation of passes without needing, or for various personal reasons being capable of, any such kind of application.  I also had a massive hatred of secondary school, and a visceral awareness of every single shortcoming the early 1990s UK educational system possessed for certain kinds of disenfranchised schoolchildren, good at English (which equates to clever in a certain narrow view of education) or not.

At the time, I could not decide whether failing a university application was a good thing or a bad one.  I would have been the first of my family to complete a degree anyway; we worked and earned so we survived; education you didn’t arguably need was a bonus if you could get it.  I had applied (as usual) with no idea at all of how I would survive financially or emotionally if given a place.  Like most of the working class, I was bright, witty, in desperate need of money, and had a decent work ethic having successfully worked since I was 14 years old by lying about my age, something that was still possible then in backhand jobs, so I did what lots of people leaving College were doing, and started an apprenticeship instead. Mine was with British Polythene Industries, and comparing the two options, the apprenticeship was easily the best preparation for work, real life and earning.  I completed both the NVQ 2 Administration and NVQ 3 Customer Service in six months, the qualifications in office based NVQs back then I feel really just confirmed completion of relevant tasks in the workplace rather than teaching new skills, and were the lightest, easiest part of the apprenticeship at the time. Within a year I was back on a well worn track for the working class, earning a perfectly acceptable salary as a result. Enough to buy my first house, no less.

I was left with something interesting from this whole experience though.  I was now ironically imbued with the kind of skewed fascination with higher education that can only ever come from having been horribly rejected.  By the millenium four years later, I was 22 years old, had moved north for higher salaried, city-based employment, owned my own house, and earned 22k per year in a highly respected politically driven sociological sector writing employability projects for long-term unemployed miners, when I wandered across an advertisement for the TILL division of University of Sheffield.  Adult learners were being recruited to degree programmes, and while part time learning was a small sacrifice (doubling the length of the course), fees suddenly became manageable, particularly now that I had relocated and actually lived in the same city.  The biggest blow was that the adult learning programme did not offer Archaeology as a standalone programme, the closest I could achieve was a tripartite degree combining Archaeology, Natural History, and Geology. The trade off was that the tutors were excellent, the content surprisingly sociologically driven which matched newer work interests, and I had two new, credit weighted qualifications and there were lower thresholds for TILL, so I slammed the entry criteria.  And so here began my lifelong love affair with education, which I never left again until retirement…