Giving myself a HPAT on the back

I tried so hard to think of a title involving a pun on “HPAT” and that was the best I could come up with, sorry.

I know I’m a bit late in writing this, but due to me forgetting to put tags on my last post it didn’t get posted until yesterday and I wanted to wait for that to be up before I began my lengthy whinge on the HPAT.

Saturday morning I bounced out of bed at 8.00am. The good thing about having the mocks before the HPAT was that I was used to making myself get up at unholy hours (I’m lucky if I see the early side of noon most Saturdays).  As planned I had a big glass of berocca boost and a filling breakfast and made sure I had all my necessary bits and pieces (passport in flowery passport cover: check, 2B pencil that cost me €1.45 (and us in a recession and all!): check) My dad drove me to the RDS where I was somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of people there. I did a quick multiplication of that number by the various centres around Ireland (there were over ten I think) and had a brief moment of panic. With roughly 3000 applicants for medicine this year, and roughly 450 spaces, you’re up against 6.5 people for your medicine place- not to mention that many of those places are saved for mature students, HEAR students and foreign students.

The panic soon dissipated as I realised that the HPAT was turning into the social event of the year as I met a whole load of people I hadn’t seen in ages. It does make you feel like a right nerd when you begin to recognise people from debates and chemistry talks though. 9.30 to 11.00 was mainly spent wondering what on earth was going on as the whole thing seemed really badly organised. We were left standing outside Serpentine and Industries hall in the RDS for ages, we had to queue just to find out our seat number and then go back outside, we were shunted from one hall to the next , we were left standing in a giant queue that snaked all around the little green/courtyard area and no one seemed to have a clue what was going on.

Eventually we were told to break out of the queue and just go into the hall where our ID and tickets would be checked. God only knows why they didn’t decide to do this in the first place. After a lot of sitting around in the hall, peering around at other people and feeling slightly intimidated by the girl to my left who was sitting poker-straight with eyes fixed forward for the entire waiting time, we were finally given our exam booklets and told to begin. The first question in the Logical Reasoning section I remember quite clearly because it really threw me. I immediately saw that it was to do with probability, and therefore maths, and started to panic. Luckily seeing as I’d just done my mocks the rules of the Leaving Cert were hammered into me and so I moved on to the next question until I felt calm enough to attempt the probability question, which turned out to have nothing to do with maths whatsoever. That section wasn’t too bad overall, though I was quite pushed for time as I knew I’d be.

Section two, the Interpersonal Relations section, was much harder than in the sample booklet I’d ordered from ACER. Many of the questions seemed to have two or more appropriate answers so a lot of the answers I gave came down to guesswork. Now I never thought I had any problems with my interpersonal skills but I finished that section wondering whether I had Asperger’s or something. At least that section I finished well within the time so had time to look back over it and change some of my answers.

I think it was during this section that I realised a) The hall was freezing and I could not stop shaking (Oh how I envied those people in their lovely hoodies and Ugg boots) and b) Someone near me had the most dreadful BO I have ever smelled. If that person gets into medicine I sincerely pity his/her patients.

The next and final section was section three, non-verbal reasoning. I was fairly confident about this section before sitting the exam. I had done well enough on it on the practice paper and developed a method of guessing if worse came to worse. Well this section fairly destroyed any shred of hope I’d been clinging on to that the exam might go well. It was a horrible, horrible section. So many questions I answered by purely guessing, not even educated guesses. The last three or four questions I didn’t even look at, just filled in random boxes as we were told to put our pencils down.

As our booklets were collected I realised that I’m going to have to do an almost perfect Leaving Cert if I am to have any chance of getting in to medicine. Beforehand I was content with aiming for a very good Leaving Cert, but after that exam I’ve come to realise that it’s all or nothing. Fortunately everyone I spoke to afterwards felt the same way, everyone found the actual HPAT much harder than the sample, so if all scores are low across the board and not just mine then I’ll be happier. Fortunately it was Valentine’s day so I arrived home to a bag of presents that were either pink or covered in hearts from my mum (mums are so great like that!) and was wined and dined and given roses that night by my boyfriend, which picked up my mood to no end!

Roll on June 22nd.