Sydney Life

So, it’s come to this, has it? Thirteen years of education (fourteen if you’re unlucky), one year of hell, and then a week where you’d be lucky to remember anything between raucous parties and bottles of “Stalin’s own” vodka. And it all boils down to a 6:00 start on the 19th of December when HSC results are released, and then a nervous 24 hours until UAI results come out. All the hype, all the terror, all the tears have been transmogrified (by the miracle workers at the Board of Studies) into a number. And then you ask yourself, “is that really all I am?”

Absolutely not. And I think that’s the safest thing you can say about the HSC. It may be a lot of things, it may be hard work, boring, unbelievably annoying and seemingly insurmountable, but it certainly does not define who you are or what you will do. If you get the mark you want, great! Congratulations, good on you! Fantastic! But, regardless of your marks, there are always going to be a variety of pathways to do what you want to do. If you miss out on your dream mark by only a few points, chances are there is another course that’s pretty similar to the one you want to do, either at a different uni or with a lower UAI. All you have to do is give it your best shot in first year, and transfer later on. Or, failing that, maybe you’d like to give TAFE a go, and then work your way into uni from there. There’s a million and one ways to do what you want, even if it’s not exactly your dream course.

That said, I won’t deny that the day results are released isn’t nerve-wracking. Friends of mine (including one Asako-Sophia) thought the best remedy was to destroy the self in an oblivion of alcohol, minimising the impact of the results when they finally came through in the morning. For me, this wasn’t something I wanted to do alone. I stayed home, up late fretting and biting my nails until I finally drifted into an uncomfortable sleep around 2:00. My body clock woke me up even before my alarm went off, and I sat in front of the computer, waiting for the seconds to tick by until results went up. In the end, I was too nervous to do it myself (I know, loser) and had to get my parents to do it. Luckily for me my marks were good, and I was pretty sure of entry into my ideal course.

All up, it is/can be a very draining period, emotionally, physically, spiritually. But, the reality is that (at least in my case), within three months of my results coming back to me, the HSC was effectively forgotten. No one mentions it at uni as anything other than that “terrible thing I had to do to get here”, and with all the trappings of a rich social life and a full academic timetable, you’ll barely even remember that you’ve done the HSC. You want proof? When it came around to October this year, I looked at the paper one day and said “my, where did the time fly? It’s been a year since I’ve done the HSC”. And that was that. I haven’t looked back since.