Last chance?

I received a text message at 9:15 p.m. to tell me that I've been offered an undergraduate place to study for a BA at the University of Sydney.  I better accept.  And I better be serious about my degree aspirations this time.  I've lost count of the Higher Education establishments and courses I've enrolled in and not completed.  Stirling twice.  The Open University twice.  There was a Polytechnic in East London (I can't even remember its name)  Now Sydney.  Get with the programme Douglas.

It's an odd thought that all over NSW this evening there must be thousands of young people - eighteen and ninetween year olds mostly - leaping with joy, running to tell the good news to their parents, texting friends to say I got in or where are you going, posting excited messages on Facebook, MySpace and the rest.  Tens of thousands of enthusiastic students on the threshold of transformation bursting with excitement, faking indifference, burning with ambition, making plans.  There will be lots of dissapointed or (at best) sanguine others who haven't received an offer via UAC on this big night for the application system; who didn't secure their first choice, maybe not their second or third either so they're weighing up whether or not they really are prepared to relocate to some regional town with a second-tier university to study a subject to which their not entirely committed. 

I've no idea how I'll do this - study for a degree and hold down a full-time job like mine.  I've no idea if I can afford it.  But if I don't enrol, don't commit myself to it, don't aim for a First then a Doctorate I'll merely confirm what we already know, repeat what I've done before, demonstrate yet again that academically I can't cut the mustard (whatever that actually means).  I / we / people have joked for as long as I can remember that I've got a brain the size of a planet. Time to prove it.
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