This blog has been shortlisted as part of our JC student blogger competition

How do I write a blog about my student life after the academic year has ended? Well, pretty much ended, anyway. I submitted my last assignment for this year two weeks ago, for which I will not receive the courtesy of a mark until about mid-August. Ish. Ten weeks, give or take the odd week or two. Roughly. Not because we are on Jew-ish time, which is vague enough at the best of times, but because we are running on something even more nebulous than JMT: Open University Time.

This, it transpires only after you have enrolled and committed the next six years of your life to them, is an entirely separate realm of mathematics, that is only slightly harder to understand than quantum physics. The Open University is a very strange world. You are both surrounded by colleagues - at seminars, study days, Facebook groups and course module online chatrooms - and completely and utterly alone - sat at home surrounded by books, with no one to talk to, little structure to speak of, guidance or support.

But I love to study. That's the Jewish bit. The inexorable love of learning. If I stopped to calculate how much more money I would have in the bank if I was not so in love with learning, I would weep (I think my bank manager probably already does, copiously and frequently). I suppose, looking at my family tree, it was inevitable. Greatgreatgranddaughter of a tzadik, greatgranddaughter of a rabbi, granddaughter of a man who rose from ticket office clerk to the Board of GWR via night school, greatniece of two classics professors – and that’s just on my mother’s side. Doomed to a love of learning. Or, as my best friend puts it, just really, really nosey about stuff.

Emma Freeman is in her fifth year of a part-time BA Philosophy and Psychology degree at the Open University