Starting studies this September but the wrong side of 40 (or 30, or 25)?
Put the kettle on and take a rare pause in the day to read about my own misadventures as a mature student in Chronicles of a Frazzled HOSPA Learner – Part 2: The Exam
In I sprinted, a flurry of sweat, partially remembered revenue management facts, and coffee, spilled from the Costa Coffee cup I had hastily discarded in my rucksack, without realising it was not quite empty. Later on when I arrived back at the car park ahead of my drive home, I would search my pockets frantically and in vain for my car parking ticket, a casualty of my poor preparation and planning, lost somewhere between where I THOUGHT the exam would take place, and where it ACTUALLY took place, much to the amusement of the parking attendant, but for now…………..
I was here. Finally, here. So much learning, so much revision, grabbing 30 minutes during my lunch break to read up on the complexities of market segment analysis, late nights at the kitchen table with only a well-thumbed copy of Hayes & Miller’s “Revenue Management for the Hospitality Industry” for company, the humming of the oven and sloshing of the washing machine punctuated regularly by the sounds of my two-year old’s nightly protests: “DADDY!!!!! I DON’T WANT TO GO TO BED!!!!”. So much preparation for the exam itself, I had forgotten to research how I was actually going to get there! The upshot being that I had turned up at the right university, but wrong campus.
And now, as if to taunt me: a picture of calm, composure and confidence, perched studiously on the top stair outside the exam room, going over her carefully annotated and colour coded revision notes one last time. What a contrast! Lord knows what that young lady preparing for her HOSPA exam thought of me on the stairwell that day! Her, all librarian poise and quiet confidence; me, all Mr Bean: frantic and foolish, falling over myself, praying that the remnants of my coffee had not infiltrated my only pen.
Now it’s important to cut myself a little slack here, this was 2018: 20 years after I last sat in an exam hall and, unfortunately, my younger self had archived any useful exam technique related information in a dark and dusty cupboard and thrown away the key. I can’t imagine that, since Covid-19, HOSPA still insist on candidates sitting exams in person but, on entering the exam room, I was right back to school: the uncomfortable silence as the papers are given out; the urge to turn the paper and sneak-a-peek before you should; the slight panic when you read the first question and nothing registers, so you read it again, the absolute panic when the first person smugly leaves the exam room having completed all questions 30 minutes early (so long suckers!) and you have eight questions still to answer.
And the hand cramp – oh the pain! I don’t remember this at all from school and so I can only assume that the muscles in my right hand had atrophied as a result of swapping pen for keyboard and now, here they were, asked to perform two hours of arduous labour, without warning or interval: the equivalent of waking up from a 20 year coma and immediately starting a shift down the mine. One thing that did come flooding back, thankfully, was the advantage of planning time proportionally, taking into account the number of marks awarded for each question. Although I was literally scribbling down the answer to the final question as the examiner signalled the end of the exam, I was grateful that I had taken a few minutes at the start of the exam to map out, on my newly bought (and never used since) Casio calculator, how much time I to afford to spend on each question. Planning is everything people 😉.
As another cohort of “mature students” (although “mature” is debatable with me) both with HOSPA and in universities all over the world, get ready to set sail this Autumn, I urge you overall to be kind to yourself. I often joke, when delivering guest lecturers to students at universities, that I fell into hospitality. At 18, my teenage brain had only two concerns: frequenting sometimes questionable drinking establishments (the key drinking nights of Friday and Saturday sandwiched between the cheap beer student nights of Thursday and Sunday and sometimes Monday – leaving little time to rest my liver); and, meeting young ladies to share these times with (I could also add football in here I suppose). So, I found a job in a hotel, where the GM didn’t mind you having a drink after work and there were plenty of young ladies – objective achieved! Compare your present-day self with your former life as a carefree young person! Your life now: a dizzying and endless cycle of childcare and domesticity – where every second of your time is accounted for and multi-tasking is the norm (is it possible to revise chapter 14 at the same time as making a Sunday lunch for a family of four?). As well as far less time on your hands, you also have far less space in your brain to study with!
The key, as I see it, is in acceptance that you can only do so much. Yes, studying is going to have to weasel its way into your crammed schedule and you will have to make sacrifices but, you still need to be Purveyor of Pasta Bolognaise for your family of four at 5pm, sovereign of the school run and chief comfort blanket to your best friend Lisa after her latest romantic implosion.
As I reminisce on my own adventures in the joys of being a mature student, I look back at those clumsy attempts of turning back time, not with regret at falling just short of a distinction by 1 solitary percent, or with any kind of embarrassment at my coffee drenched and hand cramping escapades, but with genuine amazement that I ever thought that I could go back to school in the first place, let alone actually make it through the course!
So, get ready to fight through the imposter syndrome, laugh at your mistakes and let yourself off the hook as you get ready to relaunch yourself into the land of learning once again.
Be kind to yourself people
Written by Jason Gossop