Finishing University

 Hello there! It's been a while since my last blog post. I ended up taking an unintentional break due to placement taking over my every waking moment😄

As has become tradition over here on my blog, it's time to round up my year at university. This will also be the final university round up post as I am now about a month away from officially graduating! 

For those who may be newer to my blog, for the past four years I've been at university studying to become a primary school teacher. My university experienced had a rocky start but I'm so glad I stuck it out because things really did get better as the course went on (finding friends also helped massively😄)

My final year at university has been the strangest and probably most underwhelming of them all due to  the fact that I was never actually on campus and also couldn't do a lot of the usual final-year traditions. This whole year has been conducted online via Zoom sessions - so I attended every lecture and tutorial from my room which was pretty weird in the beginning.  On the plus side, this meant that I never had to get up far too early to catch busy trains or stand about in the pouring rain, but on the other hand, it meant that I couldn't physically see/meet up with any of my friends or go to any of the uni buildings for the last year. A lot of the time it didn't even really feel as though I was at uni. However, I still aimed to make the best of my last year at uni as much as I possibly could. 

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The Coursework

I spent almost a full year working on my dissertation. So much time, effort and dedication went into it all and I'm very happy to say that I got an A on it (which I still feel in shock about if I'm honest😄). Despite not being able to attend any in-person lectures on campus, my friends and I were lucky that we were able to travel to uni and take the traditional dissertation photos outside of one of the uni buildings. 

The rest of the coursework itself was fairly interesting at times - having classes online and going into zoom breakout rooms wasn't so much😄. I'll be glad to never go into a breakout room again! (Although, as things can more easily be moved online if needs be now, zoom breakout rooms may be something that'll pop back up again in the future). It was so strange having to do things online this year and come up with a whole lot of new routines and ways to do things. It was nice to just spend some time relaxing or preparing for tutorials while at home. I could take my time in the mornings instead of rushing to make the train (only to find out that it had been delayed or cancelled😄 I didn't mind missing "train life"). 

I'm really lucky because my desk is in my cupboard which meant that at the end of the day I could literally just shut the doors on all my uni work and put it out of mind for a little while. Although, in all honestly, because everything was getting done from home, I found it really difficult to find a good work/home-life balance; I constantly felt like I should be working on something (e.g. the dissertation) and had found it difficult to find the time to just relax and not think about course work. Regardless, I managed to pass all of my coursework for this year and am just waiting to see what honours I've got.

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Placement

I had an eight week placement - officially it was only technically five weeks as the first three weeks didn't count towards anything and were really there as a settling in period as we hadn't been in a school in over a year. I was working in a primary 5/6 class (children aged 9-11). The school I was in was actually one I had helped in before back when I was in my final year of high school and, what was even more amazing was that the teacher and some of the pupils in the class from back then were the same this year too! So I started and ended my student teacher journey with the same class teacher. The class itself was great and such a great learning experience overall. 

While on this placement, there was another student from my course too and we got to plan/work together a lot because our class teachers worked together. This made the planning/organising side of things so much easier (plus it was great to have someone to talk to at break and lunch times rather than spending my time sitting quietly by myself listening in to others' conversations😄).

Every time I'm on placement, it takes over my life (hence why there have been no blog posts in well over a month!) and I find it difficult to think of much else because I'm always either thinking about how the day went or on what I need to do to prepare for the next day. Keeping my placement file up to date was also something that I felt I was constantly working on. In the future, I really hope to find a better balance between work and life but I'm only just at the start of all of this, so I'm hoping these things will come with more time. 

This placement I had so much more independence as a teacher and was left fully in charge of the classroom for the last two weeks of my placement. This proved to be somewhat challenging at times as classroom management has always been something I've had to work on throughout the years. It was definitely a great learning experience - especially as this was the final placement before I'm supposed to go on to become an actual class teacher! 

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I've got an online graduation in June which is particularly underwhelming. The big graduation ceremony had never really been something which I was too thrilled or fussed by however the fact that it can't actually happen now of course means that I'm disappointed and would like nothing more than to have all my family and friends come and see me walk across a stage in front of tons of strangers to accept my degree😄

Overall, I just can't quite believe my four years of university have come to an end. It's been a tough journey and I've never really thought about it all enough but now that I'm wiring this post and actually thinking back on everything, I'm actually really proud of myself. Not just for passing classes but for sticking it out when I thought I wasn't cut out for uni. The first year was one of the toughest years of my life - a lot of big changes coupled with dealing with social anxiety and trying to figure out a lot of new things. Now it'll all be coming to an end and I still can't quite believe that I'm going to be the actual teacher of my own class! Extremely nervous about what's ahead but also excited.

To end this post, I thought I'd share my top three highlights from my time at university:

1. Going on a trip with my Learning for Sustainability class to Loch Lomond ⬇️

2. Going to the primary education students Christmas ball

3. Working with a fellow student while on my final placement.

So that's it, my university journey is coming to an end! I like the idea of having all of these blog posts up on my blog site because in the future I'll have something to look back on and see how things/feelings have changed.

Hope you're all doing well!

Bye for now, xo