Back to School at My Age

There’s a particular feeling that comes with walking into a lecture theatre old enough to be most of the room’s dad. Everyone clocks you. You can feel them quietly working out whether you’re a student, a lecturer, or lost. For the record: usually a student, occasionally lost, never the lecturer.

I went back to study technology, AI, and the systems quietly rearranging all our lives, well after the age society reckons you’ve “settled.” And I’ll be honest — the first few weeks, I felt like a fraud who’d snuck in and would be found out any minute.

The impostor in the back row

The young ones around me had brains that seemed to absorb new concepts like a sponge. I’d read the same paragraph four times and still have to draw it out on paper. There’s a real ego hit in being a beginner again, especially when you’ve spent decades being the person who knows how things work.

But here’s what I learned about that feeling: it’s mostly a lie your pride tells you. The gap between me and the twenty-year-olds wasn’t intelligence — it was practice and confidence, both of which you can build. They were just less afraid of looking stupid, because they hadn’t yet built up a reputation they were scared of losing. That fear was my baggage, not a fact about my brain.

What age actually brings

Once I got over myself, I realised being older was an advantage as often as a handicap. I’d lived enough to connect the abstract stuff to the real world. When we talked about the ethics of a technology, I wasn’t theorising — I was thinking about people I knew, problems I’d seen, consequences I’d lived near. The young guns had speed. I had context. Both are worth something.

I also wanted to be there. Nobody made me. There’s a particular focus that comes from choosing the hard thing freely, as an adult, rather than being processed through it because you’re the right age.

Why bother

People ask why, at my stage, I’d put myself through it. The honest answer is that the alternative — quietly calcifying, deciding I’d learned everything I was going to learn — scared me more than a few awkward semesters.

Learning something genuinely hard later in life does something to you. It proves the cement hasn’t set. It keeps you humble, because you’re regularly bad at something before you’re good at it. And it’s a quiet act of defiance against the idea that your story’s already written.

You’re not too old. You’ll just be the oldest one in the room for a bit. Turns out that’s a price worth paying.