Rebecca Morrison RGU graduation: Uni was a balancing act

Scottish curler Rebecca Morrison is used to a slippery surface.

It’s one thing out on the ice, where Rebecca skipped her side to a Scottish championship earlier this year. But for the past two years, she’s been balancing coursework on top of her demanding sports responsibilities.

It all paid off this week when Rebecca received her MSc in Human Resource Management from Robert Gordon University (RGU).

But she didn’t have long to bask in the glory of her most recent accomplishment: The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics will be here before we know it.

And this week, it’s straight back to the rink for Rebecca.

It’s all a balancing act

In the brief lull between celebrating graduation and preparing for a competition the next day, Rebecca spoke about what it was like as an international athlete and a student.

“It can be really hard because when we’re at a competition it has such a busy schedule. You don’t really have time to fit in uni work.

“I’m quite fortunate that RGU has the sports scholarship programme, which meant that last year I got to defer some of my coursework so that I could actually get it all in on time.

“That helped a lot, otherwise, I would have struggled so much.”

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Rather than having to approach professors individually to explain every situation and ask for extensions, RGU offered a straightforward deferral request portal.

Rebecca said this was key for her, because otherwise she might have tried to take on too much.

“I’m certainly one that doesn’t like to ask for help too much. So it was good that it was just a system in place.

“It was never a case of feeling like, ‘Oh you aren’t trying hard enough.’

“It was very well accepted at RGU that our schedules as competitive athletes didn’t always allow us to get coursework done at the right time.”

Curling and coursework in Canada

Rebecca chose her two-year part-time programme because it was a fully remote course.

This paid dividends, allowing her to tackle her studies on her schedule.

But being flexible isn’t always easy, she said.

“In March I was out in Canada at the world championships, but I had a lot of Uni work to do at that particular time.

“So I had to make sure to bring the laptop and that we had good wifi where we were.

“It was difficult to decide what’s most important at times. For me, curling quite often came first.”

Curling: Aberdeen’s Rebecca Morrison leads Scotland rink to European bronze

But that didn’t mean Rebecca was letting coursework slide. It just meant that getting her work done meant making sacrifices.

“There were a lot of late nights for Uni with the nature of what I was doing. Sometimes with training and competition, the only time available is late at night.

“For me because curling is a team sport you’ve got to fully commit to that so it’s fair to your whole team.

And there’s no asking for deferrals or extensions to a world championship matchup.

What’s the next chapter?

The weeks and months after graduation can often be an awkward transition period. New graduates are either waiting to begin jobs they’ve lined up, or digging into the task of finding and applying for their next job or programme.

But for Rebecca, turning over a new leaf is going to be put on hold for a little while.

“I want to fully commit to this Olympic cycle, and then see how I’ll be using this degree after that.

“We’re actually at the start of the cycle just now, so we’ve got another three-and-a-half years of hard work ahead of us. It’s going to be quite nice to not have to study towards the end of that!”

Rebecca’s hoping to work part-time as a travel agent, helping families plan their dream holidays.

But for right now, the ice is calling.

“As a team, we start up again in January,” she said.

“We’re playing in Perth in the first weekend in January and then we’ll have two weeks in Switzerland in January as well.

“And then nationals in February, so we’ll have a busy start to the year!