In a new weekly feature, recent Her.ie recruit 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.

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Cheers To The Freakin’ Weekend There’s nothing like a bit of Rihanna to inspire you for the weekend: not that I’ve a major grá for her music or anything like that, but every Thursday as I’m getting ready to head to another four hours of classes, in my head I’m just singing this… http://youtu.be/ZR0v0i63PQ4 Video via YouTube/RihannaVEVO The rest of the evening is subsequently a bit of a waste of time. See, I am learning things about myself from week-to-week; namely that Thursday is my sleepiest day of the week and nothing I can do is going to change that. It doesn’t help that I’ve given up caffeine for Lent so tonight is really going to be a struggle. The bets are currently on here to see if I’ll last the whole day without giving in to a caffeine hit and if I do, there’s a suspicion that I’m going to sneak out of college early… As if! Pah, I am so much stronger than that. Really. In the meantime, to distract myself I decided to start one of my essays early (by early I mean it’s due on Tuesday and I’m going to go to the library today and print off stuff). It might not sound like I’m doing it early, but normally – as you probably know by now – I leave things to the last minute, such as Monday night. Instead, I’m going to embrace this new, a little bit more dedicated to the cause me and head to college a few minutes early and print off the articles that I need in order to write the essay. I’m not promising I’m going to read them though.