Today I found out whether I would be going to Aberystwyth University at the end of September.
Of the four results days I have been forced to live through, I have to say that this was probably the one where I felt least nervous.
I don't know why but, during my A Level exams I managed to keep myself extremely calm. The first exam I sat in June was a psychology paper that asked questions about Cognition, Social Psychology, Biological Psychology and Learning Theories which I found tremendously difficult. I remember leaving the exam hall and everyone asking one simple question to each other: 'did you finish?'
The answer was 'no'.
Not a single person I spoke to had managed to finish the paper. The way they expected us to switch to four different topics in such a short space of time honestly confused me. I struggled and very nearly had a panic attack in the middle of the exam.
From the moment I left the building to go home and continue revising, I decided that I would not panic about my exams as much as I had been doing beforehand. As much as I had done in that exam.
The next seven exams went okay from there. In most cases I thought that they had gone as well as I could have expected, and I believed that my Ireland exam was perhaps the best history exam I had ever sat (and I was right, but I'll get to that later).
I was calm and when I had finished, that was it. There was nothing more that I could do. I'd accepted failure, if that's what I was destined to achieve in the end.
I said at the beginning that I felt least nervous for this results day and thinking back to this previous week, perhaps that wasn't true. There were times when I would think about getting my results and I would immediately have dead legs and pains in my stomach. But walking to school today, I didn't feel nervous at all.
I had gotten into both Aberystwyth and Manchester Metropolitan, so I knew that I had achieved relatively okay results considering I needed BBC to get into Manchester.
When I managed to get to school at about 9:10, after only being charged a child ticket on the bus, I grabbed my results, smiled at my old English Literature teacher (who was staring at my hair) and left because I didn't see anyone that I wanted to talk to.
Long story short, I managed to achieve a B in History, a B in English Language and a C in Psychology.
History was honestly a real surprise. During the exam period, I had told many people that I wanted to get a B in history so that I could prove Mrs Richmond (one of my teachers) wrong. She had predicted me a C for two years, so I was going to show her that I was more than capable of getting higher than that.
I got 28 out of 40 in my coursework, which I wasn't massively happy about, but that was a B.
In my China exam (which was always the worst one for me out of the three) I got 25 out of 40, which was better than I was expecting.
In Russia, I got 38 out of 60, which is the best score I've ever gotten on a Russia paper.
And then there was Ireland. I scored 47 out of 60, which means that I got two 16's and a 15 on the essays.
This is what I am most proud of.
English Language was the subject that I had no idea about whenever I left the exam hall. We were asked to write a 'feature article', which none of us recognised as something we had actually looked at, and my ill head was just too tired to even bother worrying about it. Turns out, that went okay too.
As for psychology, I can't even comprehend what went wrong. I was one mark off a B, which is both extremely annoying but also satisfying because I know I was so close to getting three B's and exceeding the school's expectations. I got 34 out of 90 in the hellish exam, 44 out of 90 in the second exam and 29 out of 80 in the final exam (aka the one that we'd practised once). One mark off a B.
At least now I can say that there's nothing straight about me, including my A Levels.
I shall leave this little piece here for now.
Thank you so much for reading,
Chlo x
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