An Emotional Rollercoaster

I’ve always been terribly impatient, call it a character flaw if you will. Luckily, to put off pacing around the house anticipating results I had an amazing holiday of 10 days with 10 friends in Barcelona, coming back just 5 days before results, ensuring that my nails remained unbitten and my hair not torn out. I expected to be able to sleep perfectly on Tuesday night, maybe waking up around midday to wander down to the school or check my results online if I was feeling particularly lazy. I should have known better; when I finally went to bed at 2am I spent the whole night dreaming about getting results and waking up every few hours impatiently checking the clock to see if it was 8am yet. When it was finally time to get up I was a bag of jittering nerves, but donning my lucky Vespa jacket I was driven down the school where I discovered I was the first person there and it was all locked up. Brilliant. Two friends arrived a minute later and we loitered outside the doors nervously waiting for them to open. When they did, we dashed in and snatched up our envelopes before scuttling off to quiet corners of the school where we could be on our own.

I’m not sure what I expected to see, but I didn’t dwell too much on expectations when I opened my envelope. This is what I saw:

English-B1

Maths-B2

Irish-A1

French-A1

German-A1

Chemistry-A1

Biology-A1

Music-A2

Bam. 590 points. Delighted doesn’t even come close to how I felt. Try “shaking like a leaf”. Despite my happiness at my results there was the knowledge at the back of my mind that while last year I could have had my pick of Medicine courses in the country, my low HPAT score wouldn’t be enough to get me into any course this year. I spent the next 5 days gearing myself up for Human Health and Disease in Trinity, planning Freshers week and convincing myself that,actually, medicine wasn’t the course for me. All those whingy patients? Being on my feet for hours and hours? No sleep for days? No thanks. Well you can imagine my surprise after staying up all night fretting with friends on Facebook I saw a scan of Monday’s Irish Independent at 3am containing all the CAO points for 2009. Twitter had been hopping with rumours of a 715 cut off point for medicine in RCSI but I tried not to believe it until I saw it in print, but there it was: 715 for RCSI, 720 for UCD, 729 for Trinity. In 4/5 weeks I will be a med student. My 718 just scraped me in to RCSI.

You’d think I would have been ecstatic, but a combination of shock and 3am sleepiness caused me to burst into tears and have to be comforted by my sister (a fellow night owl) offering water, chocolate and vodka (I declined the latter). To tell the truth, I hated the idea of going to RCSI. I wanted to go to Trinity since I was about 5 and had spent all Summer expecting to be studying Human Health and Disease there. Now that I’ve slept on it I’m really looking forward to studying at RCSI, though I still hope Medicine might come down by 2 points in UCD and I’ll be offered it in round 2. If not, I’m hoping Trinity will let me in after 1st year if there are any places due to people dropping out.

I hope the people who’ve been reading this blog are all happy with their results and offered, please post a comment letting me know how you got on!

-Elizabeth