Distance learning has been 'essential' to pursuing dream career change

You’ve started a postgraduate course after a career working in graphic design – how does this compare to when you started your undergraduate degree?

Between finishing my undergraduate degree and starting the Masters, which was about ten years, I did a huge amount of growing up in that time. Deciding to go to university at this point in life, you have to be mega serious and I think that's a huge driving factor. 

With my Masters, I've really wanted to make sure it's going to be worth it. I work hard, and I'm going to get a good career out of it because I know what my passions are, and what I want out of life. There’s part of me that looks back and I wonder what would have happened if I’d have done this a decade ago, I could have done it by now and be getting on with my career. But life just doesn't work like that, does it?

My undergraduate degree was in psychology and I left that university experience feeling like I did really well, but I didn't think I wanted to do anything in psychology. It didn't really incite a passion in me. 

This time, I started researching universities. I wanted to be really informed to make the decision. And I realized that being on the Association for Nutrition Register was essential.

I live in Carlisle and we have one university, but they don't do nutrition courses there. So, distance learning was a no brainer. It just had to be that or not at all. I had so many questions and I fired them across to the nutrition department before I even started applying. 

I got a phone call from the course leader, Kate Austin, and she went through every single one of my questions. She answered them perfectly. I got off the phone and thought that is definitely the university for me. It has to be, if they are going out of their way to ring me up and talk to me about the course. That's why I chose Leeds Beckett.

How do you find distance learning? What are the main considerations?

Without the distance learning option, I wouldn't be doing the course because my life is here. We wouldn't have just upped and moved nearer to a university. We couldn’t have.

We've just completed a group project module, so I've got close to a couple of other people that are on the course just via Teams. One lives near Leeds and the other one lives in Birmingham. It just makes learning so much more accessible to people. You can just do it whenever you want. The modules are there for you to revisit whenever you want to – you can do it in the middle of the night if you want to.

What I've learned is you get what you asked for, and I think that's been the trickiest thing for me, because not being in a lecture room or in a classroom, you haven't got that ability to just stick your hand up and say “actually, could you just go over that again?” You've got to go more out of your way, which isn't difficult, but I'm quite a shy, introverted person. Sometimes you have to just give yourself a little nudge to make sure you’re communicating. 

The lecturers are great, and they'll put on live sessions for us to ask questions, and we've got a WhatsApp group which is quite nice. There are quite a lot of us on there, and most of the time we just talk about how we’re doing with our assignments, but to be able to share that with somebody is quite nice.

Your recent project was called ‘amazing’ by your lecturers – can you tell us a little bit about how it came about?

It was absolutely fantastic to combine my graphic design experience with a nutrition assignment. I didn't think that was going to happen at any point in this university experience, so to see the assignment had marks given for presentation, I knew I could get those marks.

I did have an advantage. I've got graphic design software, Shutterstock and absolutely everything that I could possibly want for doing that. The asthma one, the background like the water colour backgrounds that are on some of the pages, I was sat there just doodling it on my iPad and uploading it. So yeah, for me it was great fun and I absolutely loved that assignment.

When I started the course, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I thought I'd go into public health nutrition in some way just because that's where I'd seen the vacancies crop up, or possibly into the private sector, working for Pepsi or McVities or something. But when we got that assignment and I started writing, I absolutely loved it. I love taking the science stuff, understanding it and translating it for somebody else to read and understand.

I would absolutely love to do that, so that assignment for me has been amazing in terms of giving me a direction. I'm working on a piece at the moment in my own time because we finished now for the summer, and I'm going to try just submitting to some magazines. It's about the role of the gut microbiome in sports performance, so I'm going to try submitting that to New Scientist or health and fitness magazines.

Without having this experience and having somebody like Andrea to tell me it’s really good, that this could be published. there's no way I would have ever had the confidence to assume that I could do something like that. 

Andrea was absolutely amazing. So supportive. And we had a chat shortly after I got the mark, and it was wonderful for me. She was just gushing about how amazing it was. So yeah, it's been absolutely brilliant.