There was a reason, or rather a large number of them, as to why I am now at university and why I wasn't already here last year and why I am not still dredging away at the public sector's To-Do List.
To confine a convoluted tale of treachery and debauchery into a finite number of sentences, it's best to say I was not in the same mind-set as the majority of my peers when Year 12 was coming to a close. Most people had just battled their way through AS Level exams with less than pleasing results and were now concentrating on rectifying the mess. However they would go on to do this with a target; an actual aim which drove their desire to improve on the fairly inevitable mess-ups that the first half of A Levels usually holds. The summer would be spent investigating these targets i.e. what would come next?
The answer for most is usually university, with which comes the research of "where?" and "what?". Open days and trips to visit these places were common for most, and many would proceed to begin their personal statements and UCAS applications.
Elsewhere, none of this has even occurred to me. Maybe in part to me paying little-to-no attention to my Head of Year demanding we get our acts together, or maybe due to my own personal life going to hell and back. Either way, come the start of Year 13, I was definitely out of the loop. And frankly, I never found the motivation to catch up with the rest of the pack.
My priorities were simple - stabilise my life and correct my previous grades. I didn't have some kind of fantastic goal at the end of this, but I wasn't going to let personal troubles get the better of me by ruining my grades. 7 months of hell was not going to ruin 7 years of preparation.
To what end though? I disliked the idea of uni (I am a homeward bound kinda guy) but I didn't want to stagnate. So, with a growing hatred of all the talk about university, I looked down other paths. Previous ideas of studying dentistry, psychiatry, psychology, forensics, veterinary science, medicine and criminology all fell by the way side as time went on. I concluded I should join the police force, and work my way up via nothing but old-fashioned hard work. I still don't quite understand why I felt compelled to believe I could quite manage this...
While the idea of the police force is, and always has been, rather appealing to me, I don't believe missing out on university was really as good an idea I must have previously thought it was. Lacking a degree these days is quite the disadvantage. With the ever increasing problems of getting jobs in an ever-shrinking market, one must be able to stand head-over-shoulders above the rest. While in the past a degree would have been sufficient to do this, now most people have degrees. So what next, everyone gets Masters and then doctorates...? Regardless, a lack of any degree is now something that greatly goes against you in the job hunt.
So with this in mind, I am now sat here at the University of Nottingham with nothing but good intentions and an open-mind. Not that I arrived in that way, but I've found the transition to student life far easier than I was imagining I would. Perhaps the shake-ups of life over the past 2 years have long prepared me for coming here and dealing with it, but dealt with it I have. While I chose to study Zoology based more on personal interest than with a specific career goal in mind, I hope my decision will not backfire on me and that I'll leave here in 2013 with 3 letters at the end of my name, a once-in-a-lifetime experience under my belt and a better chance of not doing Braintree Council's filing anymore.
Average Ken. x
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