Hey everyone
It’s hard to believe that three months ago I was in the tiny front yard of a English rental flat on a freezing winters night, phone in one hand – desperately held aloft in search of an internet signal – and a piece of paper with the precious code that I needed to access my final high school results grasped in the other. The whole operation might have been a lot easier if I hadn’t been surreptitiously crouching behind the iron fence in a pathetic attempt to avoid catching the attention of any dodgy passers-by. After twelve years of schooling, months of gruelling study, painstaking research and relentless exams, my future hinged on a four-digit number. There’s nothing quite like icy gusts of ocean wind to bring on an existential crisis, especially when your 3G connection keeps dropping arbitrarily in and out. As an Australian girl from the warm, quiet suburbs of Sydney, it seemed so bizarre that I should be standing there at all. But if I wanted to get into the university of my dreams, I needed a very high result.
A few days before that fateful night in England, I had found myself in the beautiful city of Cambridge. Having taken a train through vast swathes of countryside greener than anything I had ever seen before, walking through the cobbled city centre made me feel as though I was awake for the first time in my life. Even though it was December, the sky was a crisp, bright shade of blue and was streaked with trails of cloud left by passing jet planes.
There’s something about Cambridge, something hard to define, that makes it feel like a beating heart. Vibrant shops nestle in the spaces between centuries old buildings, grand colleges sprawl on the banks of the river Cam and posters for student plays adorn iron railings beside bike after chained bike. Perhaps it is the sheer number of people packed into such a tiny town that makes it feel so alive, particularly in interview season. In every café, I could spot a dozen high school kids wedged between two nervous parents, books and notes spread out across the tabletops amidst empty coffee cups.
The college where I had my interview was an incredible place. From a stunning old courtyard I was lead into a warm, book-lined room that fulfilled every stereotype I had ever read about an academic’s office.
“Well,” the professor remarked with surprise as he flicked through my file “You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?”
Within minutes I was fielding question after question, my brain pulsing like a bundle of fibre optic wires with a million different thoughts. It was badass. I felt like I was flying, theories and ideas tumbling from my mouth as we tackled each new concept.
I think we all have these moments when we fall in love a dream and a vision of our own future. Maybe some of us volunteer in remote communities and decide that we want to become doctors, perhaps others spend weekend after weekend exploring galleries, determined to become artists and sculptors. Why is it, then, that so many of us sacrifice these secret hopes, why do we hesitate to actualise our unspoken plans?
If you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, you’ll often hear them cry: AN ASTRONAUT, A DANCER, A MUSICAN, A WRITER. They will shout their answer confidently and clearly without a shred of doubt. In our society growing seems to entail scaling back our dreams. Objectively, this makes sense when a person has a family to support, a house and a mortgage…life and responsibilities get in the way. Yet why, I ask you, have we begun to pack away our secret hopes and ambitions at a seemingly younger and younger age, at a time in our lives when we aren’t tied down by kids, a job and heavy taxes?
At my school in Sydney, there was a phenomenon known as ‘spending your ATAR’ that became very popular. What this essentially meant was that when a student got, for example, a 99.7, they would ‘spend’ their ATAR by taking a degree like law just because they could. I myself very nearly did this.
All my life I have been told by teachers, school and society that paying for an arts degree is ‘waste’ of time and money – a gross indulgence that will render me unemployable. Comments such as these very nearly cost me the opportunity of a lifetime to study history at Cambridge University. If I hadn’t taken a chance on my crazy dream, right now I would have been studying a degree that I never really wanted to take, hating every minute of it.
Perhaps growing
older has now become synonymous with sacrifice and comprise, but in the words of Charlotte Eriksson, “I’ve found that
growing up means being honest. About what I want. What I need. What I feel. Who I am.”
I recently received a question on my blog that made me feel very sad for the anonymous asker. They said:
“How did you deal with people after you dropped maths, I really want to but I go to a school where maths and science are the most amazing subjects and if you're not good at it you're stupid. I really want to but everyone is so judgemental!”To which I could only reply:
“Well the best way you can deal with them is by getting a higher ATAR than them. I got a 99.7 with five units of History, four units of English and Legal Studies! Honestly any combination can get you very high grades (plus a 99.95 if you are really dedicated). If you don’t like science and maths and you are confident you can be ranked highly for your humanities subjects then I say take the ones you truly want to study, you’ll thank yourself later…I know so many people who took chemistry and physics because they ‘scaled well’ who didn’t get 99 ATARs… so really you should take the subjects you are good at.”The most important thing that my final year of school taught me was that hard work combined with passion and willingness to takes risks was the only path to success. Can you imagine pursuing subjects that you hated, a degree that held no appeal for you and a job for which you felt no enthusiasm? Ask yourself, how will you feel if you devote yourself to dream that isn’t really yours…can you bear the thought of looking back upon your life and finding that all your achievements have amounted to nothing, simply because you are miserable?
You don’t owe it to society to fit a mould, but you do owe it to yourself to be honest about what you want. Although we do not enter this world on a level playing field, by deciding upon what we value – be that hard work, devotion to family or pursuit of a dream – at least we can find some sense of satisfaction and fulfilment.
You don’t HAVE to be rich. You don’t HAVE to own a house or an expensive car. You don’t have to be famous. If you don’t get a 99 ATAR and are rejected from the course your parents have been telling you to take, that is OKAY. There are a million different ways to get into the profession you want to pursue.
The point is…this is YOUR LIFE. On average, we get maybe 80, 90 years on this funny little rock floating through space that we call earth, and as a students we hold in our hands a unique opportunity to set the courses of our own futures. In the words of Robin William's character from Dead Poets Society, “Carpe diem! Seize the day…. Make your lives extraordinary”.
For the next few months, I will be here on this forum making weekly posts with all my advice in relation to school, work/life balance, study, notes, exams, marks, ATARs, subjects, university, careers etc.! The list goes on
Now is the time to lift your expectations, take chances, work hard and support each other. The HSC and your final year are a marathon, and your success depends on how much you are willing to put in. I will be here to help and answer all your questions! Together we are going make it through this
All the best, and good luck!
- Caitlin
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