I'm embracing being boring!

Getting the perfect balance between having a social life and working hard to pass your exams seems to be almost impossible.

I've always thought that I'm quite good at prioritising things in my life. I work hard and do well enough at school, spend time with my friends on a regular basis and still find time to read Grazia, paint my nails and update my blog (albeit not as much as I'd like to). The problem is I don't have enough time or energy to do everything.

One of my pet peeves is when people moan about how busy they are as if no one else could possibly have more to do than them, this kind of ties in with another pet peeve of mine which is the phrase "you think GCSEs are hard, wait until you try A levels". Everything is difficult for someone at some point and no one should be made to feel as though they don't have the right to moan. I don't know a single person who has never felt overwhelmed by the amount of revision they have to do or how many concerts they have that week and how they're going to fit in time to see their friends and actually talk to their family. More often than not it gets to the point where you just want to go to sleep and wake up when you don't have anything to stress about. But let's be honest that day will never come. People seemed to be programmed to moan and although it feels a little ironic that we spend so much time complaining about complaining, it's a fact of life.

While I was doing my GCSEs I became a bit of a recluse. I'd caught the much feared Swine Flu in October of year 11 which gave a bit of a hit to my immune system and I spent the rest of the academic year feeling just a little bit weird. Parties were becoming and more and more popular and I didn't really drink so I wasn't too interested in going out a lot. I blamed my growing unsociability on "feeling ill" most of the time, which was never really a lie but truthfully I just wanted to stay in and revise. I didn't stress out too much about GCSEs but I felt like I needed to be spending as much time as possible working for them which was probably true as I still just got "good" results, no A*s. I was really happy with them but I was no where near the top.

As my A levels are approaching I have a slightly different attitude but the principle is still there. I've never been naturally intelligent. I'm definitely not stupid but in school I've always been just slightly above average, which isn't a real problem for me, it just means I have to work hard. I think on first impression, people either think I'm really stupid because I'm loud and chatty or really intelligent because I'm often the opposite in the classroom. I need a B in Media Studies to get into my first choice university and the others can be 3 Ds. That seems pretty achievable to me but I don't want that. Getting a D grade at A level is perfectly fine, in fact it's good but everyone has personal goals and if I don't get the grades that I want it won't be a problem for me as long as I know I did everything I could.

That's why I chose not to go out tonight. I would love to be dancing away to mama do the hump in Chicagos with my best friends drinking jager bombs until the early hours of the morning but I have my A level music recital on Friday and my brain cells can't cope with the damage right now. So I've spent my evening teaching violin pupils, practising, doing some homework, revising music, watching TOWIE and now writing this blog. Every time I tell my friends that I can't go out because I'm practising or revising or doing whatever, I always feel like they think I'm really boring because they have exactly the same problems as I do and I'm sure their results will be as good as mine, if not better, even with the nights out but if I didn't give up a bit of socialising just for these next couple of months I'd always be thinking that I could have done better in my A levels. The difference between now and year 11 is that I'm (hopefully) not going to become a complete recluse and leave my friends wondering if I've fallen off the face of the earth, I'm just going to 'take it easy'.

So, to all my friends: Fun Katy will be back after my last exam on the 19th June, grab me a vodka and coke and get ready for a summer without stress!

Everything Happens for a Reason

I'm a strong believer in fate and you'll often hear me telling people that 'Everything happens for a reason'. I'm also a massive hypocrite and often struggle to take my own advice...

Back in November, one of my best friends was rejected from her first choice university and was absolutely devastated. I gave her a big talk about how it was probably for the best, she obviously wasn't meant to go there and she'd end up wherever she's supposed to be. A few weeks later I was rejected from my first choice university and absolutely fell apart. It just so happened that I made the fatal mistake of checking UCAS track just before a concert so was in the company of many people during what I'm going to call 'The Rejection breakdown'. While I was bawling uncontrollably in front of a nearly full audience, one of my music teachers gave me the same advice I'd given to my friend just a few weeks earlier, "You'll end up where you're supposed to be" and although I found it difficult to see how that could be true when I'd just been rejected from what I thought was 'the' place where journalists were made, I've come to learn that that is the phrase to constantly keep in your mind when going through the university application process.

I have now completely changed my mind on where I want to go to university and I couldn't be more pleased about it. I don't think my new first choice and my old first choice could be much more different. The university which rejected me because I was unlikely to meet the grade boundaries seems to have quite old school values with a course run by an extremely right wing individual. I am happy to work with people with different political beliefs to me however I think I would have found it quite difficult to be taught by someone who I often see on Newsnight arguing points which make me roll my eyes numerous amounts of times.

After reading an article written by this professor's star student I am feeling ecstatic that I received a rejection! I'm not claiming to be a fantastic journalist, right now I'm a complete amateur but I hope that by my third year of studying the subject at university I'll be able to check through an article I've written and make sure I haven't contradicted myself throughout whilst verbally attacking a large group of people.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sara-malm-going-on-strike-is-disgraceful-selfish-and-quite-frankly-pass-7643118.html

I am thrilled to hopefully be starting in September at a university where the Vice Chancellor is pictured making the Queen giggle and tweets a million times a day, the professors have a sense of humour and the students have fun and I don't care if it makes the difference between whether I work at a local paper or for the independent, there's more to life than what is going to look best on your CV!


Thank god I'm not intelligent!