Education, Skills and Qualifications

Story · all 20 words

The Term I Stopped Going

I dropped out of a history degree nineteen weeks into the second year, and for about a decade afterwards I described this to people as a decision.

It was not a decision. A decision has a moment in it. What actually happened is that I missed a nine o’clock lecture in the second week of term because I had been awake until four, and then I missed the next one because I was embarrassed about the first, and by the end of October I had not been to anything at all.

The seminars were the trap. A lecture has two hundred people in it and nobody knows whether you came. A seminar has nine, and if you miss two the other eight notice, and after that walking in is harder than not walking in.

So I did not hand in the first assignment, and then not handing in the first made the second impossible, because I would have had to explain the first.

I want to be accurate about the finances, because people always assume that part. The tuition fees were not the problem – this was a year when they were low and my family, while not comfortable, could manage. I did not have a scholarship and did not need one. Nobody was putting me under financial pressure at all.

The problem was that I had arrived without the one skill the place actually required, which is not intelligence and is not even discipline – it is the ability to ask for help early, while the problem is still small and boring.

By November I could not keep up with the reading, and by December there was no realistic way to catch up, and I had constructed, entirely on my own, a situation where the only remaining option was to disappear.

My tutor wrote to me twice. I did not open the second letter for four years. It was, when I finally read it, extremely kind, and offered a straightforward route back involving one meeting and a resit in the summer.

I did not sit anything that year. I did not resit anything either. I moved home in January and worked in a warehouse and told everybody it was temporary.

What rescued me was entirely accidental and had nothing to do with education. A man at the warehouse called Ashraf was doing an electrical apprenticeship in his thirties, having done exactly what I had done at a different university a decade earlier, and he was the first person who had ever told me that story without shame attached.

He got me onto the same scheme in the September.

Four years, paid throughout, and a vocational qualification that I have earned my living from ever since. I did not revise for a single exam in the way I had at school, because everything I was tested on I had done four hundred times with my hands. My marks were the best I had ever had in my life.

I do not have a degree. I did not graduate from anywhere and I have never once been asked to.

What I regret is not the history. I would have been a mediocre historian. What I regret is the four years between the second letter and reading it, which I spent believing I was a person who had failed at something, when what I had actually done was fall behind in October and lack a script for saying so.

I now employ three apprentices. The first thing I tell all of them, on the first morning, before anything about safety or tools, is that if they go quiet on me for two weeks I will assume they are drowning and I will come and find them.