What if....

Day Eight: Something you always think ‘what if?’ about

I was very proud of the results that I got for my GCSE’s, still am, because that was the last time that I was ever truly happy with my exam results. I decided to stay on to sixth form at the school, I had 5A’s and 5B’s, why should my A-Level results be any different? All my friends were staying on at the schools sixth form and I was able to study the subjects that I wanted to, so why bother moving?

I started back at school in September, happy that I had done the right thing and excited to carry on learning, one step closer of achieving my dream of going to the University of Liverpool to study Veterinary Medicine. But then it all went very wrong. First came the French incident, an argument with the French teacher which led to me dropping out of the French class before the teacher had the chance to kick me out. Then came Chemistry. Science was always the subject that I had been good at, but all of a sudden I was struggling to grasp Chemistry, with French dropped, I had no choice but to persevere with the Chemistry as I wouldn’t be allowed to drop another subject, besides, I needed 3 A-Levels to get in to University. I slowly came to realise that the dream was slipping away from me.

I loved studying Biology and History, but I couldn’t even get decent grades in those subjects either. I decided to lower my expectations, and I applied for Zoology rather than Vet Med, but I stuck with the University of Liverpool, despite efforts from teachers to get me to apply for Universities much lower down the rankings.  A-levels results day was one of the worst of my life, I left Wallasey School with grade E’s in Biology and Chemistry and a grade D in History, and I was bitterly disappointed, even today 5 years on. It was one of the worst feelings, opening that envelope and seeing the grades in front of me on paper. The only thing that saved me from getting a U in Chemistry was good course work, I had failed every Chemistry exam that I took that summer. That leaves me with something that I have wondered about almost every day since I got my A-Level results, what if I had left Wallasey School after my GCSE’s and did my A-Levels elsewhere?

It’s something that I still think about, why didn’t I move. If I had went to a different sixth form, maybe I would have passed, I could have saved myself all that hurt, because it did hurt, it still does. It really knocked my confidence, until then I had believed that everything was possible, but now I doubt all that I do and it haunted me all through University, I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t as good as everybody else, and I shouldn’t have done, no one should ever have to feel like that. I may have been at University now, living the dream, in my 5^th year of Vet Med.

You might me saying, ‘well if that’s what you wanted to do, why didn’t you just re-sit you’re a-Levels?’. I’m the first person in all of my family to go to University, there was no one else to talk to about it, and the school was eager to push as many people as possible through their sixth form and on to University. I was never given the options to re sit anything, and I was never told that I could move sixth form, I was just pushed through the system. Of course, I know all about that now, and there is no way that I’ll let anyone that I know go through what I went through.

On the other hand, if my A-levels had been better, I would never have went to Carmel College and had such an amazing time there, I would never have met some of my closest friends. But even that doesn’t even it out. I think that if I could, I would go back and save myself some of the pain, because I’m convinced that had I gone elsewhere, I wouldn’t have got those grades, I think I proved that to myself that I was more than capable of doing well during the foundation year when I truly grasped Chemistry, some of the highest grades that I got that year was from Chemistry assessments. I just have to live with it now, and I’ll always ask myself ‘what if?’ because that’s just the sort of person that I am, I don’t forget easily.