Student travels from East London to Durban for graduation

Lusindiso Holiday with members of his family

Lusindiso Holiday travelled all the way from East London to graduate and receive a BA Honours Degree in Social Behavioural Studies on 22 June 2019 in Durban.

Holiday said his undergraduate qualification was in social sciences. Ever since he started working, his work always revolved around HIV/Aids advocacy/prevention/management, psychosocial support services for HIV clients and gender-based violence programmes.

His interaction with the clients he met during these programmes motivated him to want to learn more about their truths so as to equip himself with the knowledge and set of skills necessary for the successful and effective handling of cases. So enrolling for the BA Honours in Social Behavioural Studies (HIV/AIDS) made sense to him.

Holiday says he can now safely say he is ready to take on the world, and to continue serving his nation. He says he chose to study with Unisa for two reasons.  Firstly, for its reputation within the South African higher education space and the respect it has as a distance learning institute.  Secondly, studying with Unisa allowed him the freedom to study in the comfort of his environment, at his own pace, with all the resources available at his disposal.

Holiday said he liked the support he received from the tutorial letters. They gave students a step-by-step process of how they should tackle and approach each question they had to answer. And mostly, he loved the support they received from their lecturers, especially for the research modules.

With the research skills attained throughout his experience in the research modules, Holiday says he is ready and confident to take on a master’s degree programme and further postgraduate studies beyond that.  He said studying with Unisa gave him the confidence and discipline to work independently, sticking to and meeting strict deadlines. 

With this experience from his Unisa studies, Holiday is definitely set for life and ready to play in the global professional space.  He says that most of the challenges he encountered as a Unisa student were administrative, and he knows that the university is constantly working on addressing such challenges.  In his studies, his challenges were around working with classmates he did not know and had never met, and having to understand and respect them.

* Submitted by Jo Cossavella, Marketing and Communication Officer, KwaZulu-Natal Region