It really is devastating when you don't make your A-level grades - for a million and one reasons. You've felt sick about opening your results for days, it's literally haunted your entire summer, and then that dreaded Thursday in August comes around and it's probably the most nerve wracking experience of your entire life so far. And then to make all the stress and anxiety even worse - you pluck up the courage to open your results and you haven't got the grades you needed to go to your dream uni.
Of course everyone who did get the grades is celebrating and whilst you're happy for them because they're your mates, you really just want to curl up and sleep through all their euphoria. Wake me up when you're done buzzing, please.
Trying to get your head around going to a university which you only put because you didn't really know what to put, is really, really hard. And on top of that is the disappointment that you feel for not actually getting the grades you thought you deserved. Then there's having to tell people. It really is traumatic. However, you will look back in a few years and think, why the hell was I such a stress head? Here's why you shouldn't feel bad.
My firm choice was Newcastle and it was the only place I wanted to go. I looked through millions of prospectus' for my insurance choice and in line with my entirely indecisive personality, I had absolutely no idea where the hell I wanted to go, which had grades low enough to make me sleep easy at night, knowing even if I failed horrifically, I'd still get in somewhere. So one day, sat in my sixth form library, I stumbled across my University of Brighton prospectus. The grades were BBC - so low enough incase I massively cocked up and erm, I'd never realised before but Brighton looks AMAZING. All I needed were the photos of Brighton beach, the Sussex countryside and the 'Student Life In Brighton' section and it was completely sold. I had never been to Brighton, but then I never thought I would miss my grades, so this, at the time was a non-issue.
When I did miss my grades, made even more annoying by the fact it was for three marks, I realised that I was either not going to Uni, or I was moving to the other end of the country, where everyone was Southern and Seagulls were the size of buses.
Moving to Brighton and attending my insurance choice uni, was the best decision I ever made. And I'm not saying that in retrospect having just graduated. I said it to myself after my first week, my first day. Sometimes things happen which we think are the worst possible scenarios, but a lot of the time they're not. It makes me feel sick and completely panicked to think that I was so close to not going to Brighton. Almost like when you nearly cut your finger off on a sharp knife and you get that image of if you had and it goes through you and makes you squirm.
John Lennon once said, "there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be" and I've never agreed with anything more than this, when I moved to Brighton and met incredible friends and someone who I feel terrified to imagine I might never have met. If you haven't met your firm choice grades, try and take comfort in the fact that it might not necessarily be the nightmare you think you're in. Be excited, even if the uni isn't as good as your firm - you'll soon see this as much less of an issue than you think it is now and wherever you go, you will meet amazing people and it will be the best time of your life.
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