Off to be an arts student

I’ve kept relatively quiet about this for the past few months because I didn’t know what was going to happen about it, but this Thursday I got a letter from the University of Manchester making me an unconditional offer to do an MA in Ancient World Studies, starting this September. No, I haven’t gone completely round the twist (no more than usual anyway), it’s something that I’ve wanted to pursue as an interest for ages, but I haven’t had chance until now (I couldn’t really justify doing it as a degree as I wanted job prospects beyond flipping burgers at McDonald’s). Unfortunately it means becoming an arts student for a year and forever having the letters ‘MA’ after my name, but every silver lining has a cloud.

I’ve got a couple of weeks to go before I start the course, so at the moment I’m keeping myself busy with lots of Manchester Friends of the Earth activities and generally going round saving the planet and setting the world to rights—on a very small scale of course. I can’t believe how much of a lefty activist I seem to have become though, it’s quite worrying! There’s even a photo of me in a Friends of the Earth t-shirt, looking as if I’m going to whack Ann Coffey MP with a selection of Big Ask postcards.

I’m also working on a new version of Rogue Students, written from scratch because I’ve decided that it’s less hassle to do that and only implement the features the site needs rather than attempting to get several pieces of open source software to all authenticate off the same user data. So far the user registration code is mainly complete, although it’s using pre-defined values instead of displaying a little form to fill in, and verifying email addresses also works. I’m hoping to get logins working by Tuesday, which shouldn’t be too difficult as I’ve written a customised login system before so it’s mostly a case of copying code that already exists rather than creating something new from scratch.

As for company ideas, they’re coming along nicely and I just need to put aside a few hours to go over the paperwork and make sure that it’s all present and correct before I send it off to Companies House. Hopefully if I can get that done by the end of next week then I’ll be all set up to run freelance work through the company by the time I start the MA, although it will probably take until the end of October to get a bank account and switch all my business activities to that.

So, despite not currently having a job or a course to study, I’m fairly busy. Speaking of which, I should probably get back to work…