Results Day!

If you follow me on Twitter, then you may have realised that last Thursday was a pretty important day for me - it was my A Level Results Day!
I was considering writing a post the night before talking about what I hoped to get the following day and what it would mean for me if I did/didn't get the grades that I needed, but I decided in the end that I would be too depressed if I didn't get the grades to look at the post afterwards and it may have led to me suddenly abandoning my blog in shame of not getting the grades!
...I did get the grades, by the way.


But before I explain what I'm going on to do with the grades that I needed, I'm going to give a little explanation of how I got to this point.
I've always been a fairly smart student, without sounding like I'm blowing my horn too much. Maths in particular is something I'm good at and something I really enjoyed doing, but I was hesitant to do a Maths degree because - and I don't mean any offence to anyone here, this is just genuine ignorance - what can you do with a maths degree?! Instead, I decided I would do Economics, which in my head is basically just maths applied to the real world, set in business situations.
So after exploring some options of Economics degrees, I found that a few universities did Economics and Politics as a degree which caught my interest, as I've always loved looking into international affairs and things like that, but wouldn't want to pursue a straight politics degree because I've never done anything like it before - at least I have done a Business GCSE and lots of maths! But ultimately, after a lot of advice coming from friends, teachers, my mum and even a trip to the careers advisor, I decided that Economics probably wasn't the best place for me to follow, simply because I would be spending £27k at least on a degree that I may not even enjoy. Money has never been a barrier to stop me from wanting to go to uni or from being able to go, but at the end of the day that is a lot of money to throw about when you're not sure about something!!

However I knew that I still wanted to do something related to Maths in some way and should probably stick within Business Schools because that's just where I feel like I belong more than anywhere else on the educational spectrum, so I decided upon Accounting. For a bit of background, my mum is an accountant, my dad has working in finance previously and my stepdad is qualified as part of CIMA, so accountancy pretty much runs in my blood.
I started looking into the options of what was available to me when I found the program that I'm now going to be working within!

What I'm going to be doing is a sponsored degree, where half of the year I will be working for a large accounting firm which I won't name but it really isn't hard to guess..... And then the other half of the year I will be going to the University of Birmingham to get an Accounting degree. While I am working, I will be out working on audit and visiting clients to gain some valuable skills and hands-on experience within the role, and then I'll have a typical university experience for the other half of the year! Once my time at uni is over and I've graduated with an Accountancy degree, I'll go on to spend a further year studying part time to become qualified as part of ICAS to become a chartered accountant - all by the age of 23!

Obviously this is going to be a pretty intensive course - a typical degree crammed into half the time, along with working full time whenever I'm not at uni - but I do love a challenge and this program honestly sounds perfect for me!

Right now, I honestly could not be more excited to start on September 14th and have been rushing around since results day because I've just realised that not only do I now have to have the wardrobe of a uni student, but also a working woman?! That's a perfectly good excuse to buy new clothes if ever I heard one!!

If there's one message I would want you to take away from this post, it's that it's okay to still be looking for what's right for you in terms of your future. Talk to as many different people as you can - ask them what they think you're good at, what qualifications they have, how they got to the job they have today, etc. Every person does things a little differently so don't ever think you have to follow the traditional path - I'm even getting a degree and I'm still not following the typical route that most students will take.

For all of you who got your results last week, I hope you got what you wanted/needed and that all your hard work pays off, and for the GCSE students awaiting their results this week - good luck! Oh and start revising for your A Levels now, because boy are they tough ;)