What I Learned From Going Back To Study in My Thirties
The power (and challenge) of embracing lifelong learning.
“I’m a student,” I replied to the dreaded question: so what do you do? “But…I used to be a Very Important Business Person.”
Okay, I never replied with exactly those words. But my responses pretty much always tried to explain that I had worked before, that I’d even had a pretty good job, that I was previously a Hardworking Taxpaying Citizen.
And every time, I cringed. Why was it so difficult for me to say I was a student and leave it at that?
I hadn’t thought that much of it when I applied to go back and study a two-year Master’s at 31, almost ten years into my career. I’d always known I wanted to study again at some point and had been saving up for years. I never thought I might experience an identity crisis calling myself a student again.
But new to Munich, a city where many students dream of landing a job for life at one of the big company HQs like BMW, Siemens or Allianz, I realised a lot of people found it strange. “Why did you give up a good job?” one engineer asked me.
He’s right, what was I thinking? I thought to myself.
Now, on my graduation (albeit a very unceremonious one given Covid), I can tell you that creating space in your life for learning is a very powerful thing. But it certainly isn’t easy. In fact, I think learning might be something we have to practise — if we don’t do it often, we forget how to learn.
Why bother? In the current climate, where analysts add more and more jobs to the list of occupations that will be displaced by technology, lifelong learning is a survival strategy.
It’s also just happens to be fun.
So here’s what I learned from going back to study — I hope it can help and inspire you in creating your own learning path.
Being a beginner is hard
One of my favourite thinkers on creativity, Julia Cameron said:
“Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have the chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one”.
There’s a lot of buzz about the advantages of a beginner’s mindset. But, as adults, we spend our time pretending we know what we’re doing or defaulting to the familiar if in doubt (known as the Einstellung effect). Just sit in on any business meeting to see these traits in action.
I thought I was better than all this. I didn’t think I had a big ego. But it turns out that being a beginner was an incredibly hard pill to swallow.
At the start of my first semester, I tried my hand at statistics after having avoided maths for fifteen years. But the learning curve seemed too steep. Who am I kidding? I thought, am I really, honestly going to get a job using maths? Probably not. The rewards didn’t seem worth the stress of being a beginner and so I switched to a subject that was in my comfort zone. But I could have gained a lot from learning such a different skill if I’d stuck at it. Even if I didn’t ever use those skills directly.
It happened again in my third semester. I had to take on an internship as part of the course, and I found myself defaulting to the familiar again, leaning on my previous work experience instead of trying something completely new. I learnt lots of other things, don’t get me wrong, but it made me realise how I needed to work harder to become a better beginner and a better learner.
We need to be honest about how hard it is to be a beginner as an adult. Many governments and companies are planning new skills training programmes because lots of us will need to shift careers multiple times in the future. This work won’t come to much if we don’t help each other deal with the emotional impact of changing or losing our jobs.
What can we do to prepare for the future? Practise being beginners by trying out small, new things each day.
Idealism dies young — and that’s a problem
Greta Thunberg has garnered millions of supporters around the world. But many Adults Who Know Better have dismissed her approach, calling it simplistic, unrealistic and radical. It’s easy to laugh away young people’s ideas as naïve. The sceptical millennial that I’d become, I caught myself rolling my eyes more than once at the enthusiastic critique of Big Business by a fellow student, thinking that in a few years they would probably be far less passionate and far more cynical. But, isn’t that sad?
As an undergrad, my friends and I all wanted to work for the UN or the charity sector. We wanted to change the world. And everything seemed possible. But most of us soon realised that getting a job at the UN or for a charity is hard and doesn’t always pay the bills.
Now the things my friends worry about are house prices, the quality of local nurseries and finding time in the week to have some semblance of a social life (pre-pandemic, of course). But my new peers from my Master’s are joining climate protests and campaigning for civil rights.
We need passion and optimism and perhaps even a healthy dose of naivety to help us solve the world’s big challenges, like climate change. Being cynical might make us seem smart, but it won’t move the world forward.
So I’m doing what I can to take some of that passion with me by challenging the scepticism of my peers.
Learning how you perform best can make you happier and better at your job
I had no clue what it meant to go into an office every day when I graduated from my Bachelor’s. Going back to study was a chance for me to reflect on what did and didn’t work for me about the working world.
The first thing I noticed was that flexibility allowed me to optimise my energy levels and productivity. Some days I wanted to be out first thing, coffee in hand on my walk to uni. Other days I felt more like sitting at my desk at home and watching the rain. I learnt that I needed to be up early to capture the five most productive hours of my day. The afternoons were best spent reading or meeting other students.
The research backs up the fact that it’s impossible for humans to try to maintain the same levels of energy throughout the whole day. Our circadian rhythms — our internal clocks — set our energy levels at different times of the day. Everyone varies a little in this rhythm, although research suggests that only a small number of people are extreme morning larks or night owls. Research has also found that people are more likely to act up when work isn’t aligned with these natural rhythms.
My previous job actually had a lot of flexibility. But I didn’t take advantage of it because I didn’t spend time thinking about what worked for me.
One of the positive effects of the pandemic could be a more concerted shift towards flexible working. A survey by Pew Research found that 54% of employed American adults whose work can be done from home said they’d like to continue working from home all or some of the time when the pandemic is over.
Building more flexibility into how we work could improve not just our productivity but our happiness, which is a win-win for our careers.
While we’re working on being better beginners and more idealistic, we shouldn’t undervalue experience
It was exhilarating to listen to speeches from Important People about how, as students, we had our whole futures ahead of us and could change the world.
But then I remembered that I wasn’t a fresh graduate just starting out in my career. And that made me scared. The big companies all seemed to be reorienting themselves to attract the youngest, brightest, trendiest talent. I was already starting to feel out-of-date (I mean, I wear a side parting and skinny jeans).
If I feel like this now, how will I feel in ten, twenty years’ time? I thought. It’s a big problem for organisations whose employees now span four different generations. According to Deloitte, research in the US has found that age-related biases can hold older workers back.
In the UK, workers in their 50s who have lost their jobs in the pandemic are far more likely than other age groups to be out of work in the long term. Governments are working hard on skills training programmes to prepare their workforces for the future, but many governments’ focus here is on younger workers.
We need balance. Yes, older workers need to practise being beginners and being open to new, perhaps naïve-seeming ideas. But we also need to value their experience. That can start with us as friends, family members and colleagues. By valuing other people’s experience, we can help to shift mindsets.
What now?
The world changes fast. When I studied for my Bachelor’s the hot topics were terrorism and American hegemony. Ten years later, we were focusing on climate change, cybersecurity and big tech. Everybody was coding. It can be really hard to stay relevant when things move so fast.
We need to be lifelong learners because what we learn today and the jobs that we train for today won’t necessarily be here tomorrow. What we can do now is build learning into our everyday lives — both learning for our careers, but also learning for the sake of learning.
My time as a student again may be over (this time around), but now I’m trying to take these lessons with me and make learning a part of every day.
