One chapter closes and another begins...

My last exam was this morning.  College is over, I'm finished, and I already know that I've done it, I'm in, I will be going to university in September.

What a rollercoaster year it has been!

Back in November, when I posted this, I genuinely thought I might have to do the whole course again. I could not forsee an outcome where I mastered the subjects, passed the exams, and got into university. It seemed completely unthinkable.

Back in March, when I posted this, I felt utterly desolate about equilibria.  I thought I would never understand it, I certainly thought I would never pass an exam on it and it represented everything that I have ever been unable to achieve.  It was beyond me and I knew I was just rubbish at chemistry and I would never, ever be able to get my head around it.

On Tuesday, I did have to take an exam on equilibria.  I got my result back today.

I got 93%!!!!!

I also got 97% on the biology exam that I took on Wednesday, and a Distinction for my case study.  I think I only have two exams and a chemistry assignment outstanding.

My goal at this point is to get 100% distinctions for the entire course.  I don't need them; I just wanted to prove to myself once and for all that I am not rubbish, I can do this.

And now?  I have three months off.  I walked to the train station in blazing sunshine and caught the last ever train home from college.  I sat in my garden with a beer and reflected on all that I've achieved. 

The key is to take it one step at a time.  It does not matter how hard (or impossible) it seems.  Read around the simplest part of the subject, go over it and over it until you understand it, then move on to the next bit.  It doesn't matter if you have to go back to GCSE level.  Amber helped me at one point with rearranging equations - she is 11 and she understood it better than I did!

Write things out on cards, make yourself posters and stick them on the walls, answer practice questions.  In times of desperation, seek out people who can help you and force yourself on them.  Do not let them palm you off.  If they are your friends or family, they are honour bound to help you.  If they are your teachers, they are paid to.  And if all that fails, eat beans on toast for a week and pay for a tutor.  It's worth it because you have waited all your life for this opportunity.  Do not even think about wasting it.

Going back to the very beginning, I had no idea how this was going to work out.  I'm so glad now that I was brave enough.  Nobody had ever told me that if you're terrified of doing something, you should just DO IT and hope for the best and somehow, it'll all work out in the end.  I promise xxx

Musings

Today was my last 'proper' day of college.  It's half term, then revision week, then exam week, then it's all over.  Hard to believe, isn't it?  The time has flown.

But that's not what I wanted to post about.  Due to my insane revision schedule, Amber has gone to her grandparents for a week.  Carlos dropped her off there on his way to spending the weekend away with friends.  I'm having some college friends over tomorrow for revision day ... which will descend into drinking lots of wine and lighting the firepit... but tonight, I came home to an empty house.

I was reflecting on this as I walked from college to the train station.  It's very rare I come home to an empty house in the evening.  I'm quite happy in my own company, and it reminds me of the time before I met Carlos when I lived in a tiny flat by myself.  I loved that flat, I loved the freedom to come and go as I liked, and leave the place in a complete state knowing that nobody could tell me off for it.  It was fun (for a while) living on apple rings, coffee and Marlboro Lights, and being half-nocturnal most of the time.  It was, in many ways, a hugely enjoyable period of my life, and being alone in an empty house often reminds me of it.

Yet - everything is different.  This house is too big for just me and Dogbreath.  We rattle around in it.  Without the rest of the family, it feels empty.  There's too many rooms and not enough of us.  It's weird not shouting 'Hello!' as I burst through the door, and weird not to be greeted in reply.  I can't imagine living on my own here.  Ever.

So tonight, I was in the kitchen, preparing food for tomorrow, when the mournful tones of Morrissey singing "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" randomly shuffled onto my iPod.  I used to love that song when I was a miserable teenager.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I actually have 'got what I wanted'.  I wonder what 15-year-old me would think of my life now.  She might think I'd got old and boring, but I hope she'd see that the spark's still there, it's just being harnessed differently.  I'm actually happy, far happier than I ever was then.  I have found contentment in my family, my studies, my interests, my friends.  I can see the point of life, something I really wasn't able to do for a long time.  And that makes me happier still.

***drumroll please***

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I've finally made up my mind.  Dun dun duuuh:

I'm going to "the best"!!!!

This is probably not a surprise to anyone (except me)!  Here's what ultimately helped me make my decision:

• Before I got an offer from "the best", I was definitely leaning towards wanting to go there.  I even wrote a post about it.
• Since I got an offer from "the best", I have continuously felt a pull towards going there.  I doubted my choice, I considered all the options, but in the whole ten days there was never a moment when I really veered towards "the preferred" university.
• I talked extensively to Carlos about the workload and the stress it would put on me trying to keep up with A-grade chemistry students.  Carlos's opinion was, "if the university didn't think you could do it, they wouldn't have made you an offer".  There is no denying that statement and as the days went by, I found myself beginning to believe it.  They have so few places, why would they waste one by offering it to someone who wouldn't be able to manage the course?  I know it will be hard work.  But it is not insurmountable.
• This quote.  I found it when googling for inspiration and it really resonated with me:  “When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take – choose the bolder” – William Joseph Slim.  
• Last night I arranged to meet up with a friend whom I knew was my most ardent supporter of "the best".  Firstly, why would I have done that unless I wanted a little push?  And secondly, she resolved the work/life balance question.  She said: work/life balance is a feminist issue.  If I was a man, and I wanted to leave my wife and kids during the week to do something which would increase my employment prospects, NOBODY would say, but what about your work/life balance?  Nobody would say, but what if your child needs you or there's an emergency?  They'd assume that your partner would sort it out.  Carlos lives and works not 10 minutes from Amber's school.  His job is not mega-high stress or pressure.  He is able to work from home, take flexi time, leave a meeting in an emergency.  He has been incredibly supportive and is more than happy to take on the responsibility.  We have lots of friends who have offered to help.   Just because I am female and a mum, does not mean I am not entitled to pursue my dreams.  
• And when I thought back to the people who thought I should go to "preferred" university because of work/life balance, lo and behold, all of them were men.  My mum, my best friend, my husband, my daughter, my friends at college all thought I should go to "the best".  My friend last night said, 'When men talk about work/life balance, they are talking about THEIRS, not YOURS'.  I'm not sure if that's always true, but I think her point is what galvanised me to finally click the button today. 

One last thing before I promise I'll stop going on about this!

A different friend said to me last weekend, 'There is a moment when you don't know, and then immediately after that, there is a moment when you do.  It is a universal truth of every decision ever made'.  And what is really weird about this decision is I absolutely know the precise moment it happened.  Last night I woke up in the middle of the night.  I lay in bed, thinking about "the best", and suddenly I just knew.  I looked at the clock.  

So there you have it: at 4.46am I did not know, and at 4.47am I did.

How to choose between two universities when you like them both equally

As you know, I've been pondering this question for the last ten days, since my final offer came through.  I've finally made a decision, but I'm going to keep you in suspense a while longer.

My quest to make this decision has involved a huge amount of googling, visiting both universities again, asking everyone I know etc. and I thought it might be helpful to do a post about HOW I decided in case anyone else trying to make the same decision ever comes across this blog.

There are two strands to making a difficult decision like this: logical and emotional.

LOGICAL

• Visit both your university choices again, if you can.  I had already been to an open day and an interview at one and an interview at the other, but the experience of visiting a place when you want to go there is utterly different to visiting a place when you know you can go there.  I was really surprised at how my feelings had changed from the day of interview.  However, unless you're lucky, this will not make the decision easy.  I had expected to feel, "Oh this is the one!" and that didn't happen.  However the extra information did help me eventually make a decision.
• When you visit, try to collar existing students and talk to them about the university and their experience, and ask any questions you may have.  I lurked outside halls of residence at one of my choices, as I hadn't had a chance to see them, and asked people coming in and out what they thought of them.  At one uni, I went to the student union and sat in the bar, listening in to the students' conversations. This is more helpful than you might think.
• Write a pros and cons list.  I did mine in Excel.  Afterwards I realised that a straight pros and cons list is unhelpful as you're not comparing like with like.  I redid it, writing a list of what factors were important and weighted the different options.  For example, "course sounds really interesting" is more important to me than "has nice sports facilities".  I then gave everything a score out of ten for each university and multiplied it by the weightings.  Pay particular attention to how you feel when you see the final results.  If you feel disappointed that one of them has 'won', that should tell you something.

Here's the list I used, yours may be different:

Prestige of university

Interest level of course

Quality/friendliness of teaching staff

Setting a good example to Amber

Available facilities

Convenience of attending lectures

Opportunity for further study/working abroad in future

Teaching of soft skills to become well-rounded dietitian

Sports facilities

Smaller lectures/less students in the year group

Experience of being a student

Societies

Halls of residence nice/convenient

Excellent research

Convenience of travel to placements

Cost

Level of academic pressure/workload

Travel time

Work/life balance

Support for mature students

Ease of getting a job afterwards

EMOTIONAL

• Phone/email/talk to everyone you know and ask them what they would do if they were you.  Your mileage may vary with this one.  Expect some people to feel strongly you should go to one and others to feel strongly you should go to the other.  Remember it is YOUR decision and YOU have to live with it so other people's opinions only go so far.  Having said that, friends and family came up with factors I hadn't previously thought of and some of the comments people made really did influence my decision, so I think overall it's worthwhile.
• Read articles about decision-making.  I found this Tiny Buddha one particularly helpful as it has lots of different ideas.  Not all of them were helpful, just pick and choose what works for you.
• Go to the university websites and read the bits of them you've never bothered to look at before.  I'd read everything there was to read about the course, the department and the lecturers, but had never looked at the accommodation guide, the student union pages, the societies I could join, the mature students pages.  Do that - sometimes the small things add up.
• Spend a few days actively trying not to think about it.  Your mind needs time to process all the information.  At the end of last week I had exhausted all the logical things and most of the emotional ones but I still hadn't made up my mind.  A few days of not letting the decision rule my every waking moment provided clarity.
• Pay attention to your emotional reaction.  If you find yourself getting defensive about one of your choices when people suggest you should go to the other, or daydreaming about things you might do if you were at that university, or feeling any kind of pull towards one or the other -- those feelings count.  So much of difficult decisions comes down to gut feeling.  Ignore it at your peril.

Finally, remember that no decision is wrong.  You're fortunate to be in a position to be able to choose between two places you like; many many people have no offers or only one offer.  Whichever one you choose, you'll almost certainly have a great time.  Good luck deciding!

No time like the present!

Yesterday I visited 'preferred' university. Today, I'm on the train to 'best' university. It's a stunning day and I feel calm and ready. I'm hopeful that this trip will tell me what I need to know.

One of my friends is an NLP practitioner and I phoned him for advice at the weekend. He refused to offer an opinion ("I'm not you") but said that observing my feelings and giving myself space without obsessing about it are the keys to making wise decisions. He felt that logic-based methods like weighted excel spreadsheets only go so far. It has to FEEL right.

So basically what Angie said: go with your gut.

This is actually quite ...exciting!

I did it!

I DID IT!!!!!

I found out on Thursday evening that I have indeed got in to "the best" university.  I wanted to put a photo from one of my recent walks but none of my photos are good enough to show how amazing this news is.  So here's one from my holiday in New Zealand last year:

Yep, it's that amazing.  Have I said there are only 20 places?  And 450 applicants?  I thought the interview went well, but I did make mistakes.  I said that you find vitamin D in spinach.  You don't.  But it doesn't matter any more!  

Since I found out I've been going through a cycle of elation, shock, confusion, fear, joy.  Hopefully I'll eventually get to acceptance.  I'm completely unable to make my mind up where I should go.  I think I've put off thinking about this for so long that I now can't decide.

Today I wrote a list of pros and cons.  It's extensive and it really isn't helping because some factors are more important than others.  Also my situation is very unusual so other people's experience doesn't always apply.  Some people are sure I should go to "preferred" university; some people are convinced I should go to "the best".  I just don't know... I think I'm going to go and visit them both again before I make my mind up.

I'll keep you posted.  

'The best' university are not the best at punctuality...

Further to my previous post, I still haven't heard whether I got in to 'the best' university or not.

I'm diligently checking plenty of times a day though *rolls eyes*

I saw this today and it could not be more true.