The death of his father when Gus Worth was just 15 years old put paid to his ambitions to finish school and go to college. There were nine children in the family and the older boys felt under pressure to leave school to support their mother. Worth was apprenticed to a panel beater and it was nearly 20 years before he could realise his long-held desire to finish his education.
"I had always wanted to go back and I had decided about seven or eight years ago that it was something I would do eventually, but it took a while for the opportunity to arise," he says. "I had been running my own business for a number of years and for various reasons it wasn't going very well and then my marriage broke up. I had lost heart in what I was doing and it seemed like a good time to make a change."
To ease himself back into the formal education system Worth did the one-year university foundation course at Pearse College in Dublin. This course is aimed at mature students interested in going to college and it is designed to equip them with practical skills as well as providing an introduction to various academic subjects.
"I enjoyed history a lot there and the teacher, Dan Bradley, was fantastic. He was really fired up about history and passed on his enthusiasm. Initially my interest was in doing English and I actually started English in Maynooth, but decided it wasn't for me," Worth says.
He subsequently settled on a combination of history and anthropology and worked as a security man at night to earn a living while he studied. He had also discovered an aptitude for desktop publishing while at Pearse College and supplemented his income with design and layout work. This skill was to come in handy later on when he became editor of the Geography Society's annual publication, Milieu, while he was also the editor of the college's student newspaper, The Source, for two years.
Worth was also the founder of the Mature Student Society at Maynooth. "I was chatting to the vice-president of the students' union one day and he mentioned that there was no society for mature students," Worth says. "I wasn't sure where to start to set one up but I called a meeting, talked to fellow students and to various people on the academic staff and I got really good feedback.
"So we went ahead and set up the society and organised weekly social gatherings, two staff-student dinners each year, workshops on study skills and extra tutorials. I have to say that we had very good support on the academic side. Various departments chipped in with money to get us going and every effort was made to meet our requests.
"I went to college with a degree of trepidation. I'm not saying younger students don't feel this, I'm sure they do, but I think it's harder for mature students because they have a surprising lack of confidence. By getting together as a group we could bolster each other's self-confidence and a real camaraderie and network developed between matures from all years. I think it's fear rather than any lack of ability that impedes older students," Worth says.
"However, I also believe there are differences between younger and mature students which affect how they see and approach things. For example, most matures are parents as opposed to having parents; they own a house (and have all that goes with that) rather than renting for the academic year and very often they have kids of their own to worry about. So they have a very different set of problems to younger students. They also often need reassurance when it comes to studying and preparing material. The young ones can breeze in and write an essay in a few hours where a mature student can spend weeks sweating over the same thing.
"Of course I'm generalising here, but in broad terms they're coming at things from a different perspective and by having the Mature Student Society we could lay fears to rest and offer support where it was needed. I have to say we couldn't have done it without the backing of the academic staff who were with us every step of the way with ideas and assistance," Worth says.
For Worth the transition from running a business to a life spent studying and writing essays wasn't too traumatic. "I have always written and read so I didn't have the problems some people have when they haven't written an essay for years and don't know where to start," he says. "But I did find it difficult to write in the academic style which is very formal and structured. I also found the academic approach quite restricted and I didn't like the narrowness of interpretation and the narrow definition of what's important. I always felt the emphasis should be on gathering information rather than trying to prove points.
"I also had real difficulty with the `strong argument' syndrome where you were supposed to advance an argument and finish it off with a nice neat conclusion at the end of the essay. I think this was because I was older and had more life experience which makes you realise that at best you only have some of the facts and some of the answers," Worth says.
In addition to studying by day and working at night, Worth also managed to squeeze in writing and producing two plays, acting as a coach in the college's boxing club and working as a part-time liaison officer visiting schools and careers exhibitions as an ambassador for the college.
Worth graduated with an MA in history earlier this month and he is now running his own graphic design business and teaching desktop publishing part-time with FAS. His ambition is to write and he has almost finished a novel and has a number of ideas for novels and plays floating around in his head. "I don't have any long-term goal in mind at the moment but I'm pleased enough with what I've achieved so far. I used to think I'd like to do a PhD, but I'm not so sure now. We'll just have to wait and see."
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