Member-only story
Five Lessons Learnt from Going Back to University
In 2017 I enrolled on a Masters of Classical Arabic course. In 2019 I added Islamic Studies to the mix. Here are five lessons I learned, coming from a science and medicine background.
1. My skills were more transferrable than I thought
I started medical school at the age of 18, going straight from college and was in the very fortunate position (thank you kind parents!) that I didn’t have to work and study at the same time. Whilst very beneficial for my studies, it did mean that my experiences and exposures have been very limited as I have really only ever worked as a doctor, apart from the odd summer job. Coupled with that, hospital HR benefits from their workforce believing that they can’t really do anything else (so they accept worse working conditions), and so cultivate a culture of gas-lighting you into thinking that's all you can do.
However, through the masters in Islamic Studies, I have found that all the research skills that I learned at medical school were extremely helpful when it came to researching essays. I still struggle with reading long texts, but find that the analytical skills I'd developed are useful in making decisions about texts.
