Alan Palazon studied while travelling across Central and South America
In January 2025 I graduated from the MA Journalism distance learning course at the University of Portsmouth. The great thing about distance learning was that I was able to study something I was really interested in on my terms. In fact, I spent the year travelling through Central and South America while studying. Throughout the degree there were plenty of challenges but also brilliant experiences both academically and travel-wise.
I’d been working in editorial roles for three years before starting the course and wanted a formal qualification to back this up and hopefully open doors to more types of writing jobs. My plan was always to study the masters alongside travelling.
I was keen to get back to Latin America having backpacked here in my early twenties.
However, this would be the first time I balanced remote work with travel and I was nervous about how I’d manage my schedule, especially with the six hour time difference. I settled into the first couple of weeks of the course at home to get a feel for things before flying to Costa Rica.
I completed the first term while travelling around Costa Rica and was surprised by how manageable the workload was even as a full-time student doing the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) alongside the course. Speaking of the NCTJ, my advice is to spread your exams out across the year. I ended up doing almost all of mine in December, which was unnecessarily stressful as I could’ve ticked some of them off during the first term.
Over the summer I worked on the major project. There were no other assignments during these months so I could focus on that but also exploring more.
At this point I was in Colombia and spent plenty of time at the beach, and enjoying salsa music and great street food.
Getting as much of your major project done as possible during the summer will make the final term way easier.
After the summer things really picked up as the second term got underway. The assignments came flooding in from the get go and completing these while on the move brought more challenges.
Among these were power cuts. I was now based in Ecuador and during the first two months here the country experienced an energy crisis. I had no idea about this before arriving. However, by staying in accommodations with backup generators, I was able to hand in assignments on time – this was crucial.
I also had to build relationships and source interviews with locals every time I moved. Not only that, I was doing everything in Spanish. However, this was a blessing in disguise as the masters forced me to expand my vocabulary into niche topics such as politics, the law and climate change, taking my Spanish skills to the next level.
It wasn’t all stress and assignments in Ecuador either. The country has unreal nature including huge glacier-capped volcanoes, some of which I climbed. Funnily enough, there was another student from the journalism MA also living in Ecuador. We became friends and went on a few adventures together too.
Overall, my experience on the masters was more than I’d hoped for and I’ve grown a lot as a person and professionally.
Coming up with original ideas, sourcing contributors, researching diligently and organising all the other elements that go into crafting a story is hard.
But I’ve come away feeling like my ability to bring all of these aspects together and manage projects is much stronger. Also, the confidence I have in my writing abilities has grown massively.