New Beginnings

It’s another school year: the weather is turning, the leaves are falling and for most young people, it is all about new beginnings. Whether it is the start of a new school, a new university or just a new academic year, it is a time to start afresh with your newly charged batteries and look forward. 

Though it has been years since I bought my last back-to-school pencil case and a back-to-school, brand new, state-of-the-art rucksack, this year is still for me all about 'new beginnings' as I hope (if all goes to plan) to start a Masters in Journalism at the London College of Communication in October. A place that I feel honored to have seeing as I only applied about a month ago (no, I am not actually kidding). After much umming and arring about whether to apply this year or whether it was best to leave it a year and apply in the mean time, I half-heartedly filled out an application form and then left it sitting on a pile of junk in my bedroom for it to gather dust. I then decided that after weeks of what can only be described as doing very little and with no plans penciled in for the near future (or the distant one, if truth be told), I decided in the midst of  some semi pre-holiday abroad chaos to send my application off and just wait and see what happened. And blow me down, some weeks later I got a call from the course director asking to arrange an interview. Wow.  So now it was time to put a holt to my arbitrary, helter- skelter functioning and actually put things into motion and work backwards to do all the things I should have done months ago. Firstly, it was time to do some research. Proper, extensive research  into the course. I had done some prior to this in order to decide it was where I wanted to apply (I am not a complete fool) but now I needed to know things.  Proper things. So, off I went and looked up lots of facts and figures about the university, the course, the course lecturers and the destinations of the recently graduated students. I even memorized the course outline (don't ask).  I was on fire. I mean, what could I possibly be asked that I would struggle to answer now? Well, the first question I got asked of course: why do you want to be a journalist? Oh and the second: how long have you wanted to be a journalist for? Wow. I'm an idiot.  Research can only get you so far in an interview like this.

I did, however, manage to stumble and mumble my way through and managed to get an offer of a place at the end of it. I now have high hopes for this course. It is going to get me another qualification, it is going to make me a better writer,  a better journalist and hopefully allow me to get a decent job at the end of it (we'll see). 

But for now, it is all about new beginnings and new opportunities. For as  Lucille Ball once said, ‘I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I haven’t done'.