October Leaving Cert Diary: A Frightful Month
What a year this month has been! October has flown in and I can’t believe the date already, I’ve just finished up a week of exams and the October midterm is finally upon me. (Queue the sighs of bliss).
October is normally one of my favourite months of the year. October is (or should be) the ultimate comfort month, second only to December. A month of orange leaves and bonfire smoke, Hocus Pocus and Scream. If I’m honest, this year, October has just been plain scary. The workload has been intense. With exams I found myself neglecting my homework in order to study. I’m the biggest victim of procrastination, but I’m really starting to see that procrastination has no place in 6th year, it’s too easy to fall behind.
Let’s catch up on what’s happened since we last spoke…
Higher Options
At the end of last month, our school brought us to Higher Options, an education and careers expo in the RDS. It didn’t exactly go to plan, we had tickets for the 9.30-12 slot and with the traffic we didn’t arrive till half 10. I darted around in a blind panic trying to see the college stalls I was interested in and I had missed the two talks I wanted to attend. However, I would *definitely* recommend it for students, it really is a one stop shop for everything. Tons of colleges from Ireland and the UK, and even further afield such as NYU have great stalls full of brochures with lectures and students to chat to. They have a range of talks on, from “filling out your CAO”, to careers in media. They have a whole separate building full of really interesting apprenticeship displays also. All of this and more. I think it’d be a great idea for even 5th years to go as well as 6th years.
If I were to go again this is what I would do
1) Leave early and be on time
2) Plan Ahead, look up the guestlist and highlight stalls you want to visit to make the most of your time.
3) Keep an open mind. Maybe this contradicts my last point but I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was limiting myself to only the stalls I thought I wanted or needed to see. While it’s definitely a good idea to know where your interests lie instead of wandering aimlessly. I would definitely leave time to have a nose at the smaller stalls. For example, this year, Big Boss Events were advertising great debs packages and Grinds360 gave away hundreds in free grinds.
In Other News
Teachers in my school have started to take students out of religion classes to practice for the oral exam. This is definitely welcome, but it’s been a bit of a slap in the face. I think I manage pretty well in Irish and French but knowing how to write something in Irish or French is very different to being able to say it to another person. As obvious as that sounds. This became very apparent to me when I was asked, in Irish, who was the oldest in my family and I responded with “my sister, she’s 4 years old.” I’d be lying if I said the thoughts of speaking Irish or French to a stranger for 15 minutes aren’t taking up some airtime in my brain as of late, thankfully I’ve a bit of time before the Mocks when this will be unavoidable. I wouldn’t mind, I actually enjoy languages, particularly Irish, but doing them in an academic sense tends to suck all the joy out of it.
Getting Real
Speaking of the Mocks, these October exams have given me a little bit of a fright (as they were intended to do I suppose). A friend turned to me before my biology exam and pointed out that the next exams we would do were the Mocks. Sorry what? Crazy. I try to take each week as it comes and just chip away at whatever I can but sometimes the sheer amount of work I see in front of me stops me from even starting. Biology for example is a tough one, I really want to do well, especially considering I’m thinking of studying biology in college. There’s just so much on the course! Praying it will all come together (lol).
The first of the college open days is on a Saturday over the Midterm. Trinity College Dublin. I’m excited to go, I’ve been to the campus plenty but I’m interested to get some more course specific information. I’m seeing more and more how much there is to consider when picking a college or course.
On a lighter note, I’m going to take the Midterm to do a little maths revision (maths will never be fully revised…) and watch plenty of Horror Films. My results can wait till November.