Leaving Cert Diary: January
All month I have been writing the date at the top of my pages, and each time, I look at the big 2025 in the right-hand corner. 2025. The year I will graduate school.
It’s so close now it’s crazy and I don’t know how to feel. On one hand, I can’t wait for the Leaving Cert to be over and to be in Albufeira with my friends with the next stage of my life ahead of me and on the other hand I want nothing less than to leave this massive part of my life behind me and venture into the unknowns of college life.
Mock season is approaching fast and I’m coming to grips with the fact I’m really not that great at studying. I can sit down for hours and feel like I’ve covered nothing. I find myself so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of material to learn across 7 subjects.
I hate going into an exam feeling like I only know the basics and not every inch of the course, but by doing some subjects within an inch of their lives, I’ve left absolutely no time for others. I admire people who are smart studiers, I know how I should do it, pick out the topics worth the most marks, study them. Keywords, study them. Predict the poets, study them. Ditch the textbook and do exam papers. I think a serious readjustment in the study plan will need to be done after these mocks lol.
Mocks for me, start on the 4th of February and I am NOT looking forward to it. This is the first time us 6th years will sit our exams like this. I am definitely interested to see how it goes, but I don’t think it will be pretty. I have never answered more than 2 questions at a time for an English exam. I don’t know how I will manage a Question A, a Question B, a personal essay along with essays on poetry, King Lear and the comparative. AGH. Not to mention the fact I’m still only 3 chapters deep into the bottomless supply of Biology notes to be learned. I’m still trying to wrap my head around answering the ABQ in business and do not get me started on Higher Level Maths. I’m going to bury my head in the sand for that one.
In other news the CAO closes for the first time on the 1st of February. How scary! I feel so unsure of everything again, I was set on biology a mere 3 months ago but now I just don’t know. Science, secondary school teaching, primary school teaching, English, geography, film, journalism, business. These are all things that interest me so much and most feature on my CAO so far, but I know when that portal opens again in May I’ll be straight in to change and swap and switch around.
Again, and again, until it’s really time to make up my mind.