It’s serendipitous that I will graduate from Deakin University in absentia with a Graduate Certificate in Politics and Policy on my 60th birthday!
I grew up in Melbourne’s Eastern Suburbs and remember the site in Burwood long before it was the University. In the 1970s my under-12s Nunawading Vikings girls’ basketball team practiced on the site’s multipurpose courts.
Many years later in 1997, I enrolled in Deakin’s Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating with majors in Anthropology and Asian Studies. It was quite an undertaking as I elected to study off campus, two subjects a semester, while working full-time.
The ability to access information online was not widely established. I studied the old-fashioned way…reading books. I handwrote my assignment drafts before typing them up on a home computer. I was mailed unit guides with assignment instructions, and weekly exercises with photocopies of journal articles and book chapters. I would order library books from the online catalogue, and they would be parcelled up and delivered to me by Australia Post. The postie would leave them in a baker’s box near the front door of my flat. To return the books, I enclosed them in a postage paid envelope and dropped them at the post office early morning before catching a tram down St Kilda Road to get to work. I submitted assignments by post, and they were returned the same way with the lecturer’s comments and a grade.
I even sat exams at University of Technology Sydney when I lived there; because Deakin had agreements to allow students to take the exam at other universities.
It took seven years to finish but it was well worth it, particularly as I had two previous attempts at university study (at other universities) but dropped out. It’s never too late to learn and study, the Graduate Certificate is my second post-graduate course that I’ve completed while in my 50s.
Thank you, Deakin!
