Two years passed since I decided to join online community of University of Liverpool. At that time I wasn’t even sure, whether Psychology was the subject that would help me to silence the concerns about my deteriorating memory and cognition while serving the passengers 40 000 feet above the Earth’s surface where my kitchen English reduced into “chicken or beef” orders. I was stagnating, uncertain about the future and with the University diploma from my home country which was just a pleasant reminder of my insouciant college life.
It is hard to believe that those years passed so quickly and left nothing less than amazing sense of personal accomplishment, pride and new direction in life. These invaluable feelings after submission of my dissertation in Applied Psychology, however, preceded serious months of a struggle. Getting in touch with the responsibilities and time management is not always an easy job, especially not for a flight attendant. Our schedules don’t recognize days or nights, week days or weekends, holidays, feasts, Christmases, Easters, or family events. Crossing the time zones is our every day routine in the life with absolutely no routine that would enable us to commit ourselves to things like relationships, intense friendships, or studies.
I love to recall those moments in the hotel rooms where I fell asleep with my laptop on the lap, fully dressed (sometimes still in the uniform) with the lights on, sitting upright on the bed after submitting assignments, or responding to the posts from my online classmates. It seems like it happened at least a century ago, because from the time I was just careless flight attendant passed a lot of months filled with hard work, research and inscribed knowledge that profoundly changed not only me but also the direction of my life.
Online learning opens up the perspectives that people probably don’t even dream about. We can have our jobs, our family or social lives, our omnipresent wifi concerns and our newly acquired exquisite time management skills that enable us to combine these all. Moreover, possibility to work on our degree from the comfort of our homes (or hotel rooms in my case) is priceless. Maybe we don’t experience direct contact with other similarly devoted colleagues. I believe that it is the by-product of current society, however, the sense of accomplishment after all those hours spent with assignments’ wipes away all the doubts that we may feel on the winding stony road towards the successful “end”.
A contribution by Martina Durackova, MSc online, for PsychLiverpool.
