What an anti-climax!

I think I expected nerves to set in at some point. For days I’ve had that weird “now or never” feeling, that how I perform over these next two and a half weeks will affect what I do with my life for the next 4 years at least. The funny thing is, I might have my hopes up for nothing. Whether I get medicine or not could have been decided once I sat the HPAT. For all I know, no matter what points I get I could be out of the running for Medicine  entirely because of the HPAT, Practical and Oral exams.

Nevertheless, I have to do my best for myself. I’d regret it if I didn’t put 100% into this, not just because I want my course so badly, but because I don’t like to give less than 100% and I’d always think “what if I’d tried harder?” Despite this though, I don’t have that rush of adrenaline or pang of anxiety to spur me on, just hope.

If anyone’s interested, I found this article on people who do the Leaving Cert in Libya. It’s quite interesting, apparently they do much better in maths and science than us. The government wants more people to take up maths and science, and seeing as so many Libyans score so highly in these areas clearly it’s not the exams which are at fault, but the general attitude of the public towards maths and science. Here nobody bats an eyelid if you do two languages, history and music, yet if you do honours maths and all three sciences people are amazed. Maybe if maths and science weren’t put up on such a pedestal people wouldn’t see them as something reserved for only the highly-intelligent and there would be more participation in these subjects.

This morning I was very relaxed- maybe too relaxed. I had my massive breakfast (kept the hunger pangs away all throughout the exams thankfully) and my Berocca (honestly, that elixir is exactly how Grace described it- Leaving Cert Viagra) and wandered off to school. Surprisingly, not even the nerves and jitters of the other girls got me going. I like to think of my attitude as Zen, but maybe I’m just being lazy.

Our exams this year are divided between classrooms and the assembly hall, and not the sports hall as in previous years. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m not sure I like it. English today felt too like a class test or a mock. At least in the Sports hall it would feel like a proper exam. The exam went alright though. Not brilliant, as I’m not a brilliant writer and can’t think up amazing pieces of literature on the spot, but neither was it a disaster; I finished the paper and I don’t think any of the composition pieces seemed very rushed. Like most people, I did Text 1 Question A, the comprehension questions on the zoo (I refrained from calling the depressed Bear in Dublin Zoo the bi-polar bear, which I’m sort of regretting) and Text 2 Question B, the speech to parents on letting teenagers make up their own minds. I did try to use the persuasive features I wrote about in the question asking to identify persuasive techniques. Unfortunately I think the speech seemed a bit rambly at times, and might have seemed to wander off the point a bit.

The essay was not the trainwreck I’d thought it would be. Like almost every other student in the country I did the magazine article on “my experience of education so far”, and I basically just charted my experience of secondary school from 1st year to 6th year. I really hope they allow for a broad interpretation of “education” as I wrote about a lot of non-academic experiences and feebly tried to link them to the title by saying “of course the best education is experience…” That article was peppered with lots of phrases like “first years, you don’t know how lucky you are!” and “wait til it’s your turn, second years” in a desperate attempt to show the examiner “look! I know my audience!!”. Similarly my speech was full of phrases like “I can see some of you nodding along in agreement with me” which was also a pathetic attempt at me to tell the examiner “See?! I realise I’m writing a SPEECH, for an AUDIENCE, please give me marks!”

I think paper 1 went much like the mocks did. I came out of the mock feeling quite pleased with myself- which I needn’t have been because it didn’t get good marks at all. I’m hoping that maybe this examiner is a little kinder, and that my composition pieces read better because they weren’t written in as much of a hurry as the mock.

Roll on paper 2 anyway!