Caroline Murphy left her job producing RTÉ's 'The Sunday Game' last autumn. Now she's doing a higher diploma in psychology. As she begins her second year, she reflects on the daunting path back into education

Most of the time it feels surprisingly normal to be at college again after some 30 years. It's just other people who make you realise, every so often, that you don't quite fit.

Like the woman in the bag shop in Bray, Co Wicklow, who, when I asked if the black shoulder bag I was about to buy would fit A4 files and folders, said: "Oh, yes, definitely - lots of the girls going to college are using them. I'm sure your daughter will love it."

And then there was the day when, during a lull in a lab session, I was sending someone a text message. One of the 19-year-olds in my class looked over and said admiringly: "Gosh, my mum hasn't a clue how to use text."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her what that had to do with me, but fortunately I stopped in time, as she might well have told me that yes, thinking about it, I probably had more in common with her gran!

Such little incidents aside, however, it is quite incredible how easy it is to become a student again. You don't even have to really want to do it. In the best tradition of ignoring the advice that you should never apply for anything unless you're sure you want it - after all, you might get it - I had gone along with the school of advice that recommends applying anyway, to keep your options open and give you time to think. After all, you can always pull out or turn it down if you get the offer.

But I didn't want to turn it down. I wasn't sure that a higher diploma in psychology was exactly what I wanted to do, but I did know I wanted to do something different, something substantial, and that if at all possible I wanted to be qualified to do it before I was 50.

Of course I was lucky, too. I liked what I did in television - it was challenging and fun - but it was demanding, too, especially in the summers and on Sundays, and it's not everybody who discovers, just as they are beginning to resent the demands of their job, that their employer is offering severance packages.

But that was the case for me, and so I found myself, last September, with a future available and, for the moment at least, a commitment to the H Dip in psychology at University College Dublin to fill it.

Starting off, I had no big ambitions for the process. I wanted to survive it and, hopefully, discover some area of psychology that might excite me enough to move from being an interested amateur to some class of an expert, but I had no idea what that area might be.

I didn't expect to enjoy it either. I thought I would be a fish out of water in Belfield. I thought the lectures would probably be tedious. I thought the exams would be horrendous. Mentally, I just put the two years aside as a necessary passage to be endured on the way to some as yet unknown but wonderful future.

The reality turned out to way ahead of my expectations. First of all, I realised at the end of my first day (and there had been three hours of lectures that day) that I hadn't doodled at all. This, to those who know me and have sat through years of meetings and seminars watching me deface every available scrap of paper with a variety of boring, repetitive and unartistic lines, boxes and colourings-in, will be virtually impossible to believe.

I couldn't believe it myself. The lectures were interesting, and I was too busy writing to draw a single box.

Meeting up with people and making friends was easy, too. The H Dip is really a class within a class - 15 graduates who basically get an exemption from First Arts and then join the 80 or so Second Arts students who have got places in pure psychology - and so, from the beginning, there was always someone from the group to have coffee or lunch with while mulling over the great questions of: "How did we end up here, and where are we going?"

There were, of course, the bad bits. For someone who had given up all science subjects with great relish after Inter Cert, trying to understand physiology, or the ins and outs of neurons firing in the brain due to the different chemical make-up of various drugs, was very taxing.

And there were lab reports to prepare, and essays. But a deadline is a deadline - things get done because they have to, and, in fact, leaving the dirty dishes behind in the kitchen after dinner because I was the one with the "important homework" was strangely liberating.

And it also felt really self-indulgent to be using my brain for my own study rather than for sorting out or worrying about everyone else's lives and work.

So life was pretty well pure pleasure - apart, of course, for one little thing. The exams. This, of course, is the real problem with going back to college. So many people say: "I'd love to do that, but I could just never subject myself to exams again. I just couldn't do it."

And I know exactly what they mean, so don't ask me why I did. I think that before I started, because I really wanted to have a proper psychology qualification, I fooled myself. I decided that I would go to every lecture and persuaded myself that attendance alone would be about three-quarters of the battle.

But of course it isn't. The battle is to assemble masses of information, to assess it, to distil it, to understand it and, then, to learn and remember it.

Learn and remember: two words that never played much of a part in my academic career. Analyse and discuss - fine. Learn and remember - never.

So what to do?

Perhaps fate smiles on those who have jumped in way out of their depth - certainly it smiled on me.

Because just before my first exam I saw an ad for a Sunday seminar on memory techniques for exams.

My husband thought I was crazy. "Perhaps you might be better off spending the last Sunday before your first exam actually studying for it," he offered, mildly.

My two study mates politely declined the opportunity to accompany me, with clear undertones of "clutching at straws" hidden beneath their sincere sounding apologies. But the chance of a straw was better than no support at all, and so off I went, swayed eventually, it must be said, by the fact that the charge was a mere €50.

And by lunchtime I had discovered that you don't have settle for saying you have a terrible memory.

There are ways of remembering facts.

Discovering I could do it was incredible.

I came away convinced I had just spent the best €50 of my life.

And I was right. Over the next fortnight massive amounts of mental energy went into implementing the techniques I had learnt.

But it was worth it because they worked. The exams came and went. They were fine. All passed. And I was delighted with myself.

And so here I am, facing into second year, notebooks and coloured pens all bought and really looking forward to it.

I tell you, education is great - and definitely wasted on the young.