12 Things I Learned By Becoming A University Student In My 40s

Life lessons I would never have learned if I hadn’t gone back to university

I had serious concerns about returning to education as an adult. It wasn’t easy for me. I had so much anxiety about going back and the first couple of courses I applied for turned me down.

Me being me, getting turned down for a lot of basic entry-level courses, I decided to go for broke and applied for university instead. I look forward to graduating next year and sticking my middle finger up at those who turned me down. The grades I have achieved until now mean that the lowest honours classification I will get will be a 2:1 which is extremely satisfying.

So, I wanted to share 12 life lessons I have learned thanks to returning to finish my education that have absolutely nothing to do with my course.

In some ways you are better equipped for student life in your 40s

You’re likely to be more responsible, more organised and manage your time better. Those are things that come naturally through your everyday life and from being a parent and holding down a job. Not everyone naturally has these skills when they are young and I was one of those people who was a late bloomer.

Nobody thinks you’re too old for this

The oldest person in the room is likely to have the most life experience, the most confidence in themselves and the most resilience because they probably failed at so many things in life and are still standing.

The kids won’t think you’re too old for it. They’ll be too busy trying to muddle their own way through the course material.

The teachers also generally respect someone who can come back after all those years away from education too. They know how much courage it takes and they know you’re there because you want to be.

The teachers respect you more than you realised in your teens

Back in the 90s, I felt like every teacher hated every student. Now, I look at them and I see people trying to navigate their way through rules and laws and red tape while sticking to a curriculum and trying to stay sane all the while.

They mostly just want students to do well, because then it makes them look like awesome teachers who are doing their jobs properly.

Getting a bad grade is not a big deal

At 43, I realise that a bad grade is exactly that — a bad grade. At 15, a bad grade was devastating. A failed exam meant I had failed at life. Now, I know it’s not the end of my potential. The world keeps turning, the mortgage still needs to be paid, I still have to get my son ready for school each morning and it generally doesn’t make that much difference on a daily basis.

If you get a good grade it simply makes it easier to progress to another stage of education, until the day you finally leave it. Then nobody ever asks about what grades you got. That’s why it’s easier to have perspective about these things in your 40s.

You understand why students get so much time off

Learning is exhausting. It’s mentally draining. That time off is needed. Those kids need two months in the summer.

You have a better understanding of your own “why” later in life

Many of us don’t know who we are or where we want to go as teenagers. I didn’t know what I wanted to be except for some vague idea about being a writer, which everyone told me was unrealistic.

A lot of people still don’t know what they want or why they’re living the lives they are living in their 40s but it’s more likely that they will.

Now, I have a clear vision. I want to be a creative writing therapist — like an arts therapist but using creative writing instead of art, drama or music which are the usual creative mediums. I want to work with people who are neurodivergent, have dementia, mental health problems, eating disorders and people who just want to use creative writing to navigate modern life.

The job does not even exist yet, according to many job websites. So I’ll make it exist. That’s my “why.”

Asking for help is not that big a deal

To be fair, I still struggle with this. I’m living with anxiety, agoraphobia, ARFID, anaphylaxis, tinnitus and I’m mostly deaf in one ear. I need support and it still kills me to ask for it or to alert the teacher, but I do it — reluctantly. So far, everyone has been helpful and they don’t think I am useless because of my challenges. Not one person has been negative.

The help is there to ensure you have the best chance to succeed so grab it with both hands.

Exams are not scary

Exams are essentially a chance to finish one stage of the course and move on to the next one. It’s a tick on the to-do list of education — nothing more and nothing less.

The world is not the place it was in the 1990s

There’s a completely different approach to education now. Back in the 90s, there was no support available for special needs of any kind at my school. You were just hidden away at a special school if your needs were severe and labelled a problem if your needs were mild. Many of us had similar experiences.

Also, a large number of the young people I met last year seemed quiet, withdrawn and depressed. I don’t remember things being like that at all in the 90s. It’s a world with a lot of different pressures now that simply didn’t exist back then. Everyone screaming about climate change, social media dramas, cameras everywhere, conspiracy theories, pandemics… and all while they are trying to just grow up. So, when we see young people behaving in ways that don’t make sense to us, it’s helpful to remember that our world at that age is not the world they are dealing with now.

A degree does not mean you have your life together

It really doesn’t. I’ve met so many scatterbrained lecturers who are running on coffee and adrenaline. I’ve met people with Ph.D.s who have been caught up in student forum dramas because they couldn’t behave with decorum online. I’ve known a lecturer to have to take a break during a lesson because she couldn’t cope with the sheer number of questions the students asked. One had to change her name because students found out she had a criminal record and gave her a hard time.

I even had a lecturer ask if anyone had looked at the assessment question because he hadn’t and said to be honest, he couldn’t be bothered.

They’re just humans, with human problems and human failings, getting paid to get as many people as possible to pass exams, but I really expected them to be a bit more responsible than us students.

Exam passing is a skill completely separate from learning the subject

It sounds so simple and it really is but my mind was blown last year when my tutor told me that it was his job to teach me how to pass the exam. He focused solely on what the examiners were looking for and ensuring I knew how to give them that.

His approach worked. On the first exam, I got full marks. On the second, I missed out on full marks by one point. In a humanities subject, that’s really difficult to achieve. I feel like that man was a genius.

You see education for what it really is — it’s different things to different people

The one thing that has made education at a university easier as a 43-year-old is that I value it now and as a teenager, it was a big source of pressure that made me ill. I can get enthusiastic about it because I actually want to learn and I’m not being constantly told that my value in this world is zero if I don’t pass exams.

So, when I see a young person underperforming, I now believe that maybe it’s not the right time for them. They might have to take a different path until it is the right time or they might choose to learn on the job through an apprenticeship and that’s equally valid.

There is no right or wrong way to learn. Some of us learn at universities. Some of us learn through life experience. The skills I needed to succeed at traditional education, like time management, happened to be skills I learned through being a parent and having a job, which is why I now believe that right now, in my 40s, is MY time for education. There’s no time limit on learning.