In a new weekly feature, our girl Mary is sharing her journey through the very grown-up world of juggling a career with further education. Looking back over her first semester and forward to a thesis, Mary is learning some lessons along the way about time management, the trials of being a born crammer, the importance of sharing the stressful moments... and the reason why "mature student" is probably an oxymoron. _______________________________________________________ One Month On It's All Gone Wrong! It’s been a full month since I got my results and to be honest, there hasn’t been much progress made since. The ‘yay, the exams are over’ bubble lasted for a good 10 days before I got a call from my supervisor to arrange a meeting about the dreaded summer project. That meeting was almost a month ago too and - sorry if you’re reading this Donal - surprise, surprise, I still haven’t started anything. I got very enthusiastic about it all when I was talking him through what I hoped to achieve with the finished product in September, but then I went home afterwards and well, I got distracted by life. And by life, I mean Friends. In my defence, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Football is in full swing so I’m up and down from Dublin like a yo-yo to go training and make sure I try and keep my place for championship. It’s full-on wedding season too so I’ve been gallivanting around to hens and weddings, and well, that’s all of my excuses. Any of you who followed my progress through college this year will know I’m a ‘leave it to the last minute’ kind of gal – but something of this magnitude really should be started already. I know that, I promise I do. It’s just very hard to get motivated when you know you could have a lovely long evening of doing whatever you like, or an evening of staring at the computer trying to do some research. I will start soon. One day. Maybe. But in the meantime, I’ll keep pretending I'm being productive and hopefully one day it'll actually be true. Watch this space…