Not Enjoying Studying

I’m in a bit of a quandry — I should be sit­ting fin­ish­ing off another assign­ment for the Open Uni course I’m doing — BSc(hons) in Tech­no­logy, except I’m just not find­ing I’m enjoy­ing it any more.

A lot of it is to do with the course I’m doing — T214, Under­stand­ing Sys­tems: Mak­ing Sense of Com­plex­ity. While I think it should be an inter­est­ing course and of value to me (whether I stay in IT or not), I’m just not find­ing that the set work, or the assign­ments, are provid­ing me with any bene­fit in improv­ing my under­stand­ing of the sub­ject. The course is all about all the dif­fer­ent skills and tech­niques and men­tal frame­works that can be used in look­ing at sys­tems wholly, which is not going to be easy for a lit­eral and lin­ear thinker like myself, but it’s been OK if chal­len­ging up until now.

The prob­lem I’m find­ing now is that I just don’t actu­ally care about the sub­ject. While it’s inter­est­ing, I can’t sus­tain the interest in a way that leaves me with any desire to answer assign­ment ques­tions, to read on, or even to think about doing another month of this, let alone another year and five months of it.

I could stop now, and apply for a BSc (open) — I have enough exist­ing points for that. It would draw a line under the degree, and let me move on and focus on what I want to do from here. I’m work­ing on mov­ing careers, out of IT and into another organ­isa­tional / pro­ject man­age­ment field. Spend­ing all that future time hat­ing what I’m study­ing in order to get an hon­ours clas­si­fic­a­tion that will be irrel­ev­ant to my future plans doesn’t strike me as sensible.

Yes, this is all self-justification. But I’m not suc­cess­fully pass a course when I’m not inter­ested in it. This was (one of the) mis­takes I made when I was study­ing full-time first time around, and I don’t intend to make it again. I can always go study some­thing more rel­ev­ant and inter­est­ing instead, and I intend to. There has been a change in dir­ec­tion in my life, and I should be fol­low­ing the paths that com­ple­ment it, not the ones that lead back to what I was doing before.