Can You Go Back To School?

Returning to academia, which many may consider post-pandemic, provides a unique opportunity to expand your horizons, learn transferable skills and master new technology

I was in a lecture room with 20 other students when the tutor laid the essay on my desk. This was my first attempt at academic writing in more than two decades, but I felt fairly confident. I know how to write. I’m a journalist, I’ve even written a book, and the essay was only 1,000 words long. How hard could it be? My breath became short as I read the unimpressed queries neatly written in biro in the margins. At the end of the essay, I saw that my tutor had recommended that I visit the academic-writing advisor. That was how bad it was.

This was about six weeks into the first term of my part-time master’s degree in cultural, intellectual and visual history at the Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury. I’d studied classics at Cambridge, and had always wanted to do a master’s, but life – money, work, children – made it feel like an impossible fantasy. And then I left my job as the deputy editor of Tatler, went freelance, got a book deal and the fantasy became a possibility. I’d read about the Warburg in The New Yorker magazine and had loved the sound of its esoteric library and interdisciplinary approach. I won a place, spent the summer refreshing my Latin skills, bought some swanky new notepads, and turned up in late September for a series of introductory talks with my fellow students, most of whom hadn’t been born the last time I did university Freshers’ Week.

Mid-year Diary, Dhs1,000, Smythson

Going to university is very different when you are older, married, have children and are working. The desire to learn is keener when you are in a classroom because  you have chosen to be, rather than just doing what is expected of you. You have less interest in partying, socialising, the romantic potential of it all. The younger students formed fast bonds; many of them were discovering London for the first  time, going to the pub and Mexican-themed nights at dive bars in Camden. (I could have gone too – they invited me – but I remembered that dive bar from the Nineties and didn’t fancy a rerun.) There is also, I suspect, a confidence that comes with age that alters one’s experience of education the second time around. The group included four mature students, all professional women, and we contributed most in seminars, not because we knew more, but because we were not too self-conscious to speak up.

Bottle, Dhs200, Liberty x Swell

Of course, there are drawbacks too, when you are older and less supple of brain. And things seemed to have changed so much. When I was at university, people still wrote essays by hand and located books in libraries via index cards. Now everything is done online, there are boundless digital resources, many of which are mystifyingly complicated. My fellow students, so at ease with this  technological blizzard, happily offered assistance, showing me how to use the bibliographical management systems and printing things out for me because I couldn’t work out how to do this myself.

Candle, Dhs2,500,Gucci

But the point of my master’s isn’t the 21st century and its baffling technological advancements; it’s Renaissance philosophy, art and history, Machiavelli and Martin Luther. I have learnt how to decipher early-modern English handwriting and translate 16th-century Latin texts about disease. I have spent hours at a small desk in the library, the light fading outside, no phone, no computer, just me and books. This was what I’d been missing. I still have to earn money, though. I have a mortgage and a career. One of the hardest things was having to jump between journalism and academia, on one occasion, I had to leave a Latin class early to interview Kristin Scott Thomas; another time, I started adding footnotes to a newspaper column. I began to worry that my two endeavours might not complement each other in the way I’d hoped, that this splitting of my mental efforts would just make me bad at both, my journalism too sterile and my essay writing too jaunty.

Watch, Dhs62,300, Vacheron Constantin

So, I put pride to one side and went to see the academic-writing advisor. This was quite weird, especially when she showed me a website that, if you are stuck on a phrase, generates a more sophisticated  one for you. But the academic style is different from journalism, and memoir writing. Once I understood this, and worked out what I was meant to be doing, my work improved. I wrote a 4,000-word essay about a 16th-century neo-Latin poem and I got a distinction.

I have definitely noticed a trend for this among people I know, perhaps 20 years of doing the same thing is all any of us can bear. And I suspect returning to study will become more popular in light of the professional pivoting many of us will be required to do post-Covid. But I would advise choosing a course and institution carefully. The Warburg is a small academic community, offering only graduate degrees to a limited number of students. Its scale meant that the group dynamic was maintained in a way that I sense will continue into autumn, when we four part-timers return. I hope to be back at the Institute in person, at least for small tutorials. I want to meet the new cohort of young students – and I still need someone to help me with the printer. 

‘The Consequences of Love’ by Gavanndra Hodge (Dhs72, Michael Joseph) is out now.

Lead image courtesy of Instagram/blairwaldorfs

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s December 2020 issue