After leaving school, EIT graduate Rebecca Merrylees enjoyed a variety of jobs – most of them in the high-flying corporate world.
She’s been an administrator, a PA, a secretary and a beautician. When her marriage folded, she was a full-time solo mother before returning to the workforce as a part-time shop assistant.
The common thread Rebecca sees in these roles and her newly-acquired Bachelor of Applied Social Sciences degree is that they all reflect her interest in people and the pleasure she derives in supporting them.
So, this 39-year-old says, taking part in EIT’s graduation on March 25 is going to feel like a coming of age.
“It’s a rite of passage that would have been lost on me 20 years ago. I feel I am fulfilling my purpose.”
Rebecca’s degree has led to a “fantastic” new job as a programme facilitator at the Department of Corrections’ Rehabilitation and Reintegration Services in Napier. She will be part of a team offering group work programmes to prisoners and offenders serving non-custodial sentences.
RRS’s main goal, she says, is to reduce re-offending.
Others joining her for induction training come from different knowledge bases, including sociology, psychology, teaching and archaeology.
“The position required a tertiary qualification, but what the successful applicants have in common is more about how they engage with people rather than their backgrounds.”
It was “chances and events” that led to Rebecca’s decision to take on degree study. Keenly feeling her loss of status while living on the DPB, she started looking for a wider community involvement once the youngest of her three children started school.
After nine weeks’ training with Citizens’ Advice Bureau, she graduated as a professional volunteer and undertook her first prison tour. Increasingly drawn to the idea of working as an advocate, she appreciated she’d need a degree to progress on that career path and “future-proof’ her family.
Rebecca and partner Jay realised full-time tertiary study would be a huge undertaking, having recently bought a house in Taradale as a home for their blended family.
“We lived in debt for three years,” she recalls. “It was a huge sacrifice for us all.”
Now the couple is looking forward to a year of consolidation.
Rebecca loved her time at EIT and found the culture very supportive. She and a group of fellow students have become like sisters, meeting regularly to socialise and peer review.
Rebecca feels she needed to find herself before committing to tertiary study.
“Social sciences tend to garner older students, people who have lived, have had experiences and can offer something of value. I couldn’t have studied like this after leaving school.”
In fact, Head of School Gwenda Kevern says the programme is increasingly attracting younger students too. Of the 24 new first-year students enrolled this year for the Bachelor of Applied Social Sciences degree, 10 qualified for EIT’s Year 13 Study Grant, giving them free study fees for their first year and halving the fee for their second year.
Rebecca says her ever-changing journey isn’t about blowing her own trumpet, “but to show that we’re never too old to reinvent ourselves”.
The beauty of her degree, she says, is that there are so many career options.
‘I started study thinking I was heading myself into advocacy roles, empowering people by laying out their options. I never envisaged working with an offender population but it seems really natural now that I’m there.”