A mother has proved that juggling seven children, two part-time jobs and completing a master’s degree is possible, despite a couple of hiccups along the way.
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Monica Dickson, from Ballarat, graduated from Wagga’s Charles Sturt University with a Master of Animal Science on Tuesday.
After taking more than five years to complete her post-graduate course, Mrs Dickson said she was relieved her studies were finally over.
“I’m excited that I finally ticked the box and got it all done and completed it,” she said. “I found it very challenging, especially in the last 12 months, to finish it.”
Mrs Dickson graduated from the University of Queensland in 1988 and moved to Victoria, where she became a vet and met her husband in Ballarat, having seven children.
Mrs Dickson said she had a “fascination” for animal production science, but found juggling part-time work and children on top of studying too difficult.
“When my youngest started school I kind of thought I had to reinvent myself and that’s when I heard about CSU and their distance education program and thought this was right for my circumstances,” she said.
“There were a lot of balls in the air, a few of them fell from time to time.
“It was a matter of prioritising what needed to be done and forgetting about everything else; the house is very messy and it still hasn’t recovered.”
However, Mrs Dickson said the biggest challenge during her post-graduate degree was adapting to technology.
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“When I first graduated, we didn’t have computers or anything like that and it was a steep learning curve to begin with, like learning Microsoft Word,” she said.
“I had also never done assignments before because my under-graduate was 100 per cent written examinations at the end of the semester.
“Technology and doing assignments was challenging and I suppose having a family and life experiences allowed me to just focus on the deadlines and get them in on time.”
Mrs Dickson was accompanied by her husband Tim and her two youngest children Maeve and Geordie, as well as her Associate Professor in veterinary parasitology Shakoofeh Shamsi.
Professor Shamsi congratulated Mrs Dickson on her work ethic and said the ceremony was “one of the great days” of her professional life.
“I was very pleased when she contacted me about doing her master projects on parasites, but she was bit unsure as she was a distance student with a large family,” she said.
“I’m a woman, I’m a mother and I find it very [difficult] to manage; it can be difficult and I just thought she was so brave.”