I’m Leticia Cleary and I’m a USQ student.

I did go to university after school for 6 months, I did nursing; I was not born to be a nurse, I really wasn’t! And then, I left that and went to the money market and then just worked. Worked and worked and worked in a whole heap of different jobs.

I stopped working when my daughter was born and when she was about 5, just before she was starting school, that’s when I went and did the TPP programme-the tertiary prep programme offered by USQ to get you into uni and to get you back into that mode of thinking.

Because I hadn’t been studying for 20 years so to be able to go back and think, how do I schedule my time, how do I get my textbooks, who do I need to know at the uni, I suppose time management was a really big thing that the tertiary prep programme taught me, getting back and doing that mode of writing in an academic voice as opposed to a business type voice.

Then the decision was what do I apply for, what do I apply for? Psychology or Business? And I thought, I think I’d rather do Phyc.

At soccer I can sit there and read and at swimming I can sit there and read or I can work on assignments.

I’ve got that flexibility of making it work when I need it to work for me. If I can’t get to a lecture, I can still listen to it online and know what going on.

Because sometimes life does get in the way; sometimes trying to be a mum, a daughter, a friend or a sister and I suppose that’s what so good about the university and having a small university, is that everyone wants you to succeed, everyone does everything they can to help you succeed.

Some of the tutors and lecturers do provide extra support and extra time for you, because they get it, they get that you have a life outside of university as well.

So part of the reason why I went back to uni was for my daughter, so that she could see how normal it is. She’s now saying that she wants to go to university and be a vet so I think if she’s got that idea that education is normal, it’s a normal part of life, you don’t just finish it when you finish high school you can go back to it, whenever you feel its right for you.

I feel that’s a really good thing. She knows what its like when I sit down and do an essay and that it does take a lot of work, but she has also seen the satisfaction of when its finished and she is part of the celebration when it’s done and getting through it so, I think for her, to see it; is a really good thing.

I did a couple of early education electives and the developmental stuff just really interested me, and I thought, well how can I put this to good use? It just seemed like a natural extension to go back and do the teaching degree.

I had never seen myself as a teacher, but, I’ve tutored some of the other students and you can see how much of a difference it makes when you sit there and you work one on one and you explain it in a different voice and they struggle and then they get a HD on their essay and you think yay! I was apart of that. So I thought I could apply that in a job by doing teaching.

I’m pretty chuffed with myself, I never thought, I never thought I would go back to uni and do it, and have a degree, let alone the post grad as well. You can hold your head up high and be a little be proud of yourself.