Back To School (again)

It's that final weekend of the school holidays, and once again there is an air of excitement (and terror) in the offing!

On my first day back at work after our family summer holiday, I had what can only be described as a mountain of work to get through prior to being officially (finally) accepted and enrolled on the Masters.

So - for the first time I will be studying a named path to a degree rather than fully tailoring it to my own interests.  This will be the MSc Digital and Technology Solutions, for which I'm following the Software Engineering pathway.


These degrees are offered as a part of the Apprenticeship scheme, so they're fully supported by work and financially underpinned by an Apprenticeship levy - which means that for the first time, I'm not stressing about how much my learning is going to cost financially.


Testing, testing!
Despite being exempt from the 'functional skills' requirement of the course (Maths & English) by virtue of my existing qualifications, there were some preliminary Maths, English and ICT modules which were required prior to my induction meeting.  It having being several years since I'd done any Maths tests, I found myself needing to Google the formulae for surface area and volume of a cylinder, and how to calculate probabilities when throwing a pair of dice... not how I'd imagined spending my first day back, which is usually filled with extra caffeine and catching up on the work I've missed.  I also realised that I need to know more about different styles of writing - although I can structure a sentence very well, I find it harder to determine what style the author has used.

Back to essays
In addition, there was a short essay required on my current employer and position within the company, along with the requirement to produce a stakeholder map, to show the major stakeholders for my current work.


All of the above were required within the space of a day, before I could do my official 'induction' meeting with my Skills Coach.  More on that one in another post though, I think - as this one is becoming very long already! (as was the first day back at work teehee!!)