Peter:
My name is Peter and my uni is USQ.

My Journey to come to university started in 1984 when I did a mature age entry examination in Adelaide, and of lots of reasons: work, money, mortgages – I wasn’t able to take up the offer. Then in October 2007, I had a bit of an issue with aggressive cancer.

I left work, was put on a disability pension, and thought ‘what the hell am I going to do now?’ I’m not the sort of person that can just sit around and, and watch the days go by. Midday television is sort of a crime I think. I went and collected the junk mail and put that in the bin and I sat there going ‘what am I going to do now?’. I’ve got to do something – I can’t just sit here. And I looked in the bin and there was a flyer from USQ and I looked at it and I went ‘I wonder’.

It was both exciting and scary, it was like you make a decision and you think ‘well ok, we’ll see if this works out’. Within the blink of an eye you’re sitting in a lecture with twenty other people listening to someone aspout all this information about psychology.
The information you get here at USQ, the quality of the course is just brilliant.

I’m hoping to have, just a small clinic work maybe three days a week either through a medical practice or maybe a home office environment – one of my lecturers has got a brilliant office that is set up in her home umm, and I think that would just be absolutely fantastic to do that. Do things like one-on-one sessions, teach meditation just to improve people’s quality of life – I reckon that’s; if you can do that, you’ve done a pretty good job.

I moved on-campus about halfway thought last year. I was looking for somewhere I could be comfortable that would allow me to focus on studying. I hadn’t realised that I would get involved in so many things on-campus – from playing netball, to doing meditation classes, to volunteering a lot for some of the events that take place on-campus. I consider myself really lucky, I sort of fell on my feet when I came here. It’s just brilliant.

It’s a great open place, it’s very community minded. There doesn’t seem to be a great separation between the staff, the lecturers and students. There just doesn’t seem to be that sense of them and us, it’s a real community. This is not just somewhere where you got to study – this can be somewhere where you have a full life experience.

You know, I don’t think you can ever really lose track of you dream – 1984 I wanted to go to uni and I started in mid 2009. You can turn around and say ‘oh yeah, I can’t do that’ but you can easily say ‘I’m going to give it a try’ and it’s amazing if you’ve got the right attitude, you can achieve great things.