The Result

TM111 is done, and I got a Distinction.

When I wrote my last post about the module, I was two questions away from finishing TMA03 and trying not to get ahead of myself. TMA01 had come back at 89% and TMA02 at 97%, so I knew things were going well, but there’s a difference between going well and seeing the final result on the page. This is the first thing I’ve properly finished since I left retail to retrain, and it’s the first real evidence that the decision is working out.

Why It Means More Than the Grade

I said in that last post that the numbers mattered less to me than what they represented, and I still think that’s true, even if it’s a lot easier to say now.

The Distinction matters because of how it was earned: part-time, around family, alongside the home lab and everything else going on. That was the whole bet behind choosing the Open University in the first place, that I could study properly at this stage of my life without it being a compromise. One module doesn’t settle that for a whole degree, but it’s a much better answer than the one I had in April.

It also taught me something I didn’t expect to need teaching. I went in assuming the home lab had given me a head start, and in places it had. But the most useful parts of the module were the ones that made me slow down and work out why things I’d been doing for years actually worked. A good result built on that feels more solid than one built on what I already knew.

Hitting the Ground Running on TM112

There’s no long break to enjoy it, and I’m fine with that. TM112 is already underway, and I wanted to carry the momentum straight in rather than ease back up to speed.

The module is built around three themes that interleave week by week: essential information technologies, problem solving with Python, and information technologies in the wild. The Python theme is the one I’ve been most keen on. TM111 used Scratch to strip programming back to its fundamentals, and now those same ideas move into a real language, applied to real data, working towards a small programming project.

I’m not expecting my existing coding experience to carry me, though. If TM111 taught me anything, it’s that being comfortable with something isn’t the same as understanding it properly, and I went into Scratch sceptical and came out corrected. I’d rather treat TM112 the same way: take the fundamentals seriously, even where they look familiar, and use the structure of the module to find the gaps I don’t know I have.

Keeping Standards High

The approach isn’t changing, because it worked. Same study habits, same attention to how assignments are structured, and the same habit of testing what I’m learning against something real wherever I can.

The harder part will be keeping that up now there’s a result to live up to. A Distinction is nice to have, but it’s also a new baseline, and I’d rather be motivated by that than comfortable because of it.

What’s Next

This is still only the first module of a long degree, and alongside it I’m applying to any F1 team with IT positions open, so there’s plenty to keep me busy. For now, I’m taking the win, and getting on with TM112.