In common with many young women of her generation, Terrie O'Sullivan left school after the Inter Cert and went to commercial college. She spent a number of years working, got married in her mid-20s and stayed home to rear her three children.
Watching her family going through school she often thought about returning to education and doing the Leaving Certificate. However it wasn't until her youngest child had started in secondary school that she decided to take the plunge and make up for lost time.
"I was always saying that I'd like to go back and eventually one of my daughters made the point that I could if I wanted to. There was really nothing stopping me," she says. "The children were growing up and didn't need me to be around the same way and I was wary of finding myself at home with the family reared, an empty nest and nothing to do. Someone mentioned KLEAR (an adult learning organisation based in Kilbarrack, in Dublin) to me so I went along to see what they had on offer and ended up enrolling for Leaving Certificate English. "
O'Sullivan began her studies in the early 1990s and since then she has done Leaving Certificate English twice, completed a foundation course in humanities, graduated with a BA in English and human development and become one of the first group of students to graduate with a Master's degree in children's literature from St Patrick's College, Drumcondra.
"When I started back, I sat English at ordinary level the first year and did quite well so my tutor suggested that I should do it again at honours level the following year, O'Sullivan says. "I agreed because I was thoroughly enjoying myself at KLEAR doing English and I also did a number of other courses including conversational French and one in social history which I found very interesting."
Going on to college had not been uppermost in Terrie O'Sullivan's mind when she started at KLEAR but with encouragement from her tutors she decided to join three others on a year-long foundation course in humanities at Dublin City University. This was a distance learning programme designed to prepare students for the college's mainstream BA by distance learning.
"Distance learning didn't suit me," O'Sullivan says. "I found it difficult and remote and it ended up that the four of us got together all the time in Donaghemede library to work our way through the material. By the end of the year I knew that distance learning was not the way for me to go forward."
O'Sullivan was then encouraged to apply for a place on the BA programme at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra and she says she was very surprised to be called for interview and subsequently offered a place. "I just hadn't thought of myself in those terms and I was very nervous about the whole thing," she says. "But I have to say I loved every minute of it. There was a big group of mature students and we got on like a house on fire. There was great fun and great support among the group and I made some very good friends. We are still in contact as a group which is very nice."
During her time at St Patrick's, O'Sullivan won an Erasmus scholarship to spend three months of the academic year at Oxford. She lived on-campus for the time and for a woman who had never lived away from home before it was a novel experience. "I was terrified initially and a bit overwhelmed but I had a great time. I loved living on the campus and I made great friends with a couple of the other mature students."
It was during her time at Oxford that O'Sullivan developed an interest in children's literature and when St Patrick's decided to offer an MA programme in the discipline, she was one of six students to sign up. The MA was a taught programme over two years and O'Sullivan concentrated on native American children's literature for her thesis.
"It was not the easiest of topics to choose as there was not a lot of research to draw on. But I made great use of the Internet and made contact with several native American writers and used to communicate with them by e-mail," she says. "Having done a commercial course I had keyboard skills and I am interested in gadgets so getting to grips with using a computer was okay for me. I had help from fellow students at St Pat's and my family were excellent also. It was my daughter who introduced me to the Internet and my son bought me my computer.
`I think my timing of going back to education was good. The children were pretty much independent so my mind was clear in that respect and as I had been there for them all along I felt that it was only fair that my time should come. I was also very fortunate in that my husband retired and took over the housekeeping and cooking so he's been really great. I think opportunities present themselves and you have to seize them. I'm not saying it's always easy but it's amazing what you discover you can do when you have to."
