Want a postgrad degree? Get ready to live in poverty | Andre Walker | Education | guardian.co.uk

Our drinking days are well and truly behind us. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Ask all your friends what their favourite day of the month is and they will tell you it's payday. A year ago I felt the same way, but these days it's torture for me. Instead of being a day of abundance it's the day Birkbeck College (University of London) swallows my entire disposable income. Welcome to the £350-a-month world of a part-time postgraduate journalism student.

I don't want to sound negative but I miss my undergraduate life. As a late teen at Royal Holloway, my key interests were drunken chats, random sex and hangover-induced bunking off. At Birkbeck it's all about hard work, deadlines and getting out of the office in time for the evening lectures.

When I walk past the University of London union – of which I was chairman in 1999 – these days I'd be more likely to visit the welfare office than the bar. I wonder if any of the shiny attractive undergrads realise that, as a mid-ranking civil servant, my course is forcing me to run a moratorium on clothes shopping.

When I was younger I'd have mocked the woman who brought her daughter to our lecture last week. But these days we're far more worried about failing than we are about any personal childcare shame. This is our world, and it's a world where every lecture costs around £80.

Every essay mark is feared, every lecture word is clung to, and every experience of our classmates is valued. We can't afford to fail. There is no mummy and daddy to pick up the pieces if it all goes wrong – and it plays on our minds.

So I think I have a duty to warn everyone how hard this life is. Yet it's worth it, despite the hardship. I'm learning so much, and I freely admit to being a postgrad evangelical. In my class we're way too mature to add each other on facebook, but I wish we did. These people are worth knowing. The lecturers are not lofty academics: they're real journalists with knowledge of the business.

My life is a financial mess and it's hard, but I wouldn't swap it for the world. My advice for anyone considering doing a postgraduate degree is to take the plunge and study part-time. It's a nightmare, but you'll secretly love it.

via guardian.co.uk