Personal Blogs

I turn 57 today.

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy and peaceful Christmas and a productive new year.

I have been thinking about my final phase/ last 9 years of my working life.

It is going to do my Psychology conversion masters of the next 14/16 months. That will also get me registered with the British Psychological Council. During that time i will continue to deliver cognative behavioural therapy interventions, we call them brief suites of intervention, to people with community sentances. That will take me up to applying to do the dual KUF/MOJ role.

As part of the HMPPS academic insights programme, one of my collegues presented her doctorial thesis on teaching philosophy and ethics to people in long term custody in prison.

As a OU philosophy student, i have always been interested in theories about self identity and the social contract.

So i thought, once i have done the accredited masters, i will put forward a doctorial propsal to the Probation service that involves the creation of an intervention for people on community sentances that focuses on CBT intervention focused on self identity and it's relationship with the social contract, and if that is approved do the viability study and development of a specific intervention based on that.

That would tie up a great deal of my study, into a toolkit that would remain in use, long after i retire and i could retire with a PHD. Since pensions are calculated on the average salary of your last 5 years of service, it makes sense to me to aspire to maximise by qualification level and pay band for those last 5 years.

This might be very pretentious on my part or a reasonable doctorial thesis proposal. 

Start with the positives.

400,000 views, thank you everyone. I am very humbled by the achievements in popularity of this blog.

Work is frustrating. The staffing problems and workload pressures of the crminal justice sector are well known and well recorded.

It would be foolish of me to expect it to suddenly be different.

Still the frustrations are there, in 21 months i have now been transferred 3 times, so i have worked in 4 offices, getting to know the team, the specific arrangements for each office, than as soon as it settles, moved on again.

6 line managers in 21 months, each one discussing in supervision the importance of rapport and working relationships, and then being changed for someone else 2 months later.

And the joys of a shared service cetralised payroll and HR system are boundless. Letters telling you that you have been over paid on bssic salary being emailled out, then no letter of apology or acceptance of error when it turns out the pay was correct all along.

I should list for balance some positive elements, as soon as i find one i will list it.

Everything came back in digital copies from DMU.

All  confirmed.

I am now the proud owner of two Arts degrees.

One from the OU and one from DMU and i am alumni to both.

Graduation  ceremony is in the third week of January 2024 in Leicester.

I had a look on google, DMU have a funky orange trim to the gowns, and i get to wear a mortar board cap with it.

Went to Cardiff this week with son #2.

He is starting there in September to study Law so had a look around the law school, halls and out of professional interest, the Welsh Government buildings.

Cardiff is lovely, son #2 is lucky to be going and is very excited.

I did take a picture, but this OU blog will not allow any pictures bigger than the amount of computing power in the apollo 11 lander, i think it was just under 4 mega bytes. Since a phone these days uses more than that just to display the camera icon on it's screen, then no pictures get uploaded here anymore.

So roll on September the 20th and a 2 and a half hour drive to take him and his survival gear to Cardiff.

Son #1 is not attending his masters graduation ceremony in Portsmouth this coming week, he did not see the point in doing so.

So a odd contrast, son #1 being so over university he is not attending his last graduation ceremony and son #2 being hyper excited about starting university.

Kids eh? 

388,000  odd views of this (my) blog 

Thinking back to starting it...

I wrote a couple of posts in my first year of study and i was pleased to have 120 views.

Then i started to blog more and the views picked up, and i got to 5000 views, i thought that was staggering.

Then i studied the A222 philosophy module, and i did not enjoy it, and i blogged to great extent about how much i did not enjoy it....

That was the moment the views started to get beyond anything i could have thought possible.

And on it trundled.

Now it might make 400,000 eventually.

That is so kind of you all to bear with my A222 angst and other witterings.

Thank you.

That's all folks.

Well they have put in person graduation ceremonies back on.

I have booked Poole on the 30th of April 2022.

Who else is going to that one?

Results are in. I passed, so i now have a upper second class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

I have accepted a job offer with the civil service, they will fund my masters study. So i am off to spend the last 15 years of working life in professional service with the Ministry of Justice, with my degree and hopefully with a master of science in Economic Crime.

So that is it for me and the Open University. It has been a long road, but it is now travelled.

Thank you to everyone who visited my blog  i ended up with 293,000 views.

If anyone comes across this blog long after i have finished with it, my parting words of advice are:

You can do it.

Be organised  it will help.,

Remain focused.

Work the problem  if you come across them.

It will change your life for the better.

Try not to study Philosophy, it is painful.

Enjoy your success when it arrives.

Message ends.

Winchester, through UCAS finally got back to me.

I have a conditional offer from them for a MA Liberal Arts.

I think i will be going to Portsmouth, but at least i have a plan b now.

My very last OU TMA is due next Tuesday.

I have virtually finished it, i will polish it off on Friday and submit it.

That will be my last ever TMA submission for the OU.

Only the EMA remains, my research project.

So is that sad, exciting or somewhere in between. I have mixed emotions, which i have written about before. It really is such a long journey, and i am at the final stretch. I am not sure how i feel really. 

It is all a bit odd really.

Looking at the view counter, i might fall short of 300,000 before i finish my course. I don't mind, when i first started doing this blog i had no real plans for how it would pan out, so i am delighted it did so well.

So i am on stand by tonight, giving my the luxury of a little time to do a rambling blog post.

Firstly, i am very proud of Son #1, he is on for a first with his degree, BA(hons) Politics and International Relations. He has his offer to do his masters in International relations, so all things being equal, he should get at least a 2:1 and go into the masters course. so that makes me proud, well done him. I think he is lucky, when my dad died, he left the kids the money to go to University, so there is enough to cover son #1's masters fee's, because he is continuing at Portsmouth, so he gets a discount on the masters. I wonder if he knows how lucky he is that he can graduate with a Masters degree and no student debt, although it is always a two sided coin, he could have got an apprenticeship after A levels and have had the £35,000 as a deposit for a flat or something. Looking at the data for incomes for people with Masters degree's, i hope he will fit into a good graduate programme somewhere with the option to have a good wage going forward, so who knows, it is a game of two halves. It looks like Portsmouth Uni are planning to restart graduate ceremonies, his will be in July hopefully. Followed by another one next July, with any luck.

I am still waiting for Winchester to get back to me with an offer, i have confirmed my offer with Portsmouth, so grades willing that is now my plan A, both applications ae held up whilst i wait for Student Services at the OU to give both universities my academic references. According to the website, they aim to reply within ten days, so they are not outisde that window yet. My friend Tony, who got a Masters in procurement from Manchester Uni when we were young, wrote a lovely personal reference for me, so that is appreciated.

I am now up to date with DD309, i feel so much more comfortable now with what remains and my final project. I decided my research question with be based aorund game theory and assurance cooperation games, comparing cheap talking players to third party moderators and which provide the best untility (outcomes). Game theory is a subject i find very interesting (so much more than the vast lumps of neo classical theory in DD309) sp hopefully that fact that i find my research question interesting will help me get a good mark. It is quite liberating, having had several occasions when the TMA question was really something part of the course i had no interest in and so had to drag the essay out of the very bottom of my brain. so it is nice to have the chance to do somehting i am actually interested in.

I am still feeling the same way about the OU i have for a while now, 'lets just get this done and be done with it' i did have a look at the OU Masters programme, nothing really suitable for me. Also, having looked at quite a few graduate scheme's i have noticed that a couple of the bigger name financial firms do not list the OU as acceptable institutions for their programmes. So if i get a masters from Portsmouth, then that will be less of  problem. It is weird, i have eleven weeks remaining witht he OU, after 6 years and 4 months, i am really on the final eleven week stretch.

So reflecting on the journey, it has been fun, it has been not fun, it has been interesting at points, it has been dull in points. I feel it has been worthwhile, when i started i thought i would be satisfied with the BA degree. that has changed, now i feel like i should carry on, and get the MSc degree. I have recently started to doubt how much of an achievement the BA(hons) Politics,Philosophy and Economics qualification will be, i am sure other people would feel prouder than i will, however i think it might be linked to the isolating nature of the OU study. I have not had a tutorial face to face for over a year now, and i miss that. I think that by slogging away on my own, on the lap top that i am starting to lose the feeling of connection to value of achieveing the qualification. It is an up and down thing, i guess i am not the only student that goes through the journey. I imagine this feeling is shared by others about to graduate their qualification. I think i have also lost the context of how long six and a half years really is. Studying has become habit, habit become routine, routine becomes tedium and that is where i am at now. I am glad i claimed by Diploma of higher education last year, that gave me a little push along, i also think i should have left DD316, the Politics module until the last, and got this Economics module out of the way first, the most important thing is that i binned the Philosophy at level 3, that was a good choice, and doing Economics last was a bad choice.

Spring is here, my potatoes are planted, Covid seems to be far more under control than it was, half of all UK adults are now vaccinated, so as the seasons change so does my academic season. Bighter days are ahead, warmer and hopefully more content on all counts.

i was aiming for 1000 words.... did not nail it, tailed off at 953....