What does it take to be a Unisa student

My name is Diana .

I stay in Joburg .

I'm 30 years old .

I work uh as a P A slash office manager .

I'm Desmond .

I'm 30 years of age .

Being in the accounting and auditing environment is quite a challenge .

My name is Zara Ali .

I am originally from Cape Town .

Been living in Johannesburg for about 10 years .

I'm an account manager , a part time Unisa student and I'm a professional singer as well .

Oh , after going through several approaches , several websites , that's when I decided to settle on communication science with U I A , I studied through UN I A and I qualified with a B com accounting degree .

I'm studying a Bachelor of business administration .

I picked una because my sister , she studied through Unisa .

I saw how well it was doing for her because she was overseas and she was able to study via correspondence .

And I thought , look , if I'm gonna be working and doing it part time , I think that was the best option for me .

Open distance learning requires discipline , lots of it .

There's no lectures .

There's no one standing in front of you giving you a spoon feeding you more or less uh , on a day to day basis , the material you have to go through it .

It's , uh , the honest is on you .

So it comes down to your own personal self-discipline university does not tell you what time to study .

They only give you their debts when they want their assignments .

You have your life , you have your assignments , you have to make it work .

I had to learn the hard way through , through missing my exam , my very first exam at .

But that was a hard lesson to learn .

And it taught me to be organized to make my diary well , well laid out for the semester , have all the assignments .

Uh put together self motivation as well comes into play to basically just be a little bit technology savvy .

So to be able to research um what you were looking for , I discovered that a lot of people thought I was just sitting at home and not doing anything .

They didn't realize that I was actually studying and people may forget that because you are not attending classes each and every day , you have to create an environment that's conducive to your own learning the best for me .

What worked was studying at night , which might seem a bit awkward , but it was interesting as well .

I got a lot of quiet time doing that .

It actually opened a lot more doors than I had set out to do , which has been great .

So I don't know if I'm ever actually gonna stop studying .

I'm not always looking for guidance and a lecturer or someone else .

I have to be confident in what I do .

It's made me know I am capable and being able to achieve whatever I put my mind to .

No matter under what circumstances .

Sometimes all these challenges that I've talked about , make open distance learning very difficult .

But my eyes are on the prize .

I have to keep going at the end of the day .

It's worthwhile .