Hi mark_c,
Good luck with your studies.
I teach airport engineering on a distance education basis to master's level students which is pretty relevant to the ATPL level of learning. Here is a piece of advice that I send my students each semester:
I did my masters part-time, and I know how hard it is to balance study and work and life. If you are struggling to fit it all together, a tip I can give you for assignments and study is to tackle them in big chunks of time. If you nibble away for 30 minutes here and 30 minutes there, progress is slow and discouraging. Since I'm a morning person, I look for big chunks on the weekend. I get up at 4am on Saturday and work through for 4 hours until 8am. By then everyone else is up and the normal day can progress. If I have to, I repeat it on Sunday. That gives me 8 good hours over the weekend and a lot of progress. Other people are evening people and do a 8pm-midnight stint on say Tuesday and Thursday nights.
As I went through doing my masters part-time, I used to say goodbye to all my friends at the start of the semester and then at the end of the semester, I'd have a big "welcome back party. My social life consisted of a cold beer at 10 pm on a Thursday night driving back from uni. Would I do again? - yes of course. It was the only way that I could get the qualification, and I'd rather have it than not
