My final EVER “Turn It In” submission?!
Reader, she’s made it. The final assignment submission of my undergraduate degree is in 🙌🏻. Don’t be fooled, it’s not all over: I still have an exam and two presentations to go, but the final submission through “Turn It In” is complete. If you’ve been to university or college in the past ~10 years, you may be familiar with Turn It In (or is it one word? TurnItIn? Who knows). The wait for the dreaded similarity score, comparing your submission to work previously published. Have I accidentally totally plagiarised another piece of work? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s after you’ve uploaded your one, and only, document for review.
The submissions today were just PDF documents of presentation slide decks for my two defence presentations this week: I need to defend my dissertation on Tuesday, followed by defending my newly proposed theoretical model of the antecedents of burnout in young athletes on Wednesday. If you want to know more about this let me know, but I won’t bore my more casual readers on here!
Having had written assignments in one form or another since I started school in the 1990s, it’s quite weird to have reached the end of the journey with this degree. I know what you’re thinking: she’s starting a Masters in September, probably followed by a PhD and a career in academia, she’s not finished? You’re not wrong. The Masters will have written assignments, but will be far more practically-based, with observations and supervisions as well as written work.
The end of this undergraduate degree feels like a definite milestone: I remember when I received the call from the Abertay University administrator who had been processing applications through clearing (yes, reader, she went through clearing because of that C grade for Higher English 10+ years ago, an upper second class BA (Hons) degree seemingly not overwriting the fact that I suck at close reading). I was in the gym car park and I felt a sense of dread about accepting the offer of a place on another four year degree (I had just finished my first four year degree around 18 months previous to the phone call). Would I have to leave my job? Would I be able to afford it? What is my plan? Is this really what I want to do? Clearly, I accepted the offer, and over the past four years (half of which has been remote learning because of the pandemic), I have honed in on what I want to do with these qualifications that I am spending my savings on. I am confident that I have the ability and drive to get a lot out of going to university as a “mature” student, and although I have (almost) reached the end of this degree, I’m pretty excited for where I’m going next..
