Students – be sure to study what you love, it could end up defining your life

ONE week on and the Leaving Cert results are out and congratulations to the 57,000 students. Be happy that you’ ll never be examined on such a broad spectrum of subjects ever again.

What’s important now, as students anticipate the CAO outcome, is not to take a course just because it’s the first one you qualified for.

Didn’t get medicine, might as well do gender studies? No, please don’t. I speak with authority on such matters as I preposterously picked Germanic languages, when I should have gone to art college or studied photography or film.

Seven months earlier, I had thrown 10 degree options onto my CAO form in no particular order and ended up deconstructing Old Icelandic prose and scrutinising the finer intricacies of Old Dutch morphology for four years amongst other really boring things.

Like, who cares? Stupidly, I didn’t even change to English literature along the way. Instead I completed this ridiculously ill-suited degree I didn’t like. Looking back, if I had the incredible opportunity of four years of study and leisure again, I would have done things ver y dif ferently.

We live in Ireland and we’re so lucky that education is accessible to ever yone across the countr y, whether they’re starting later in life, or don’t even have a Leaving Cert. We’re blessed compared to other countries, as tuition fees are ver y low or non-existent, grants are available and opportunities are endless. Look at graduates in the US – tens, if not hundreds, of thousands in debt af ter a classics degree, wondering why they can’t get a job.

At the risk of sounding like someone who survived the Black Death, when I finished school in the 1990s, choices were much more limited. In Dublin, there was Trinity, UCD, art college, technical college and rock school.

We benefited from cheaper rents, so students could get a place to live with ease, get a grant and a part-time job and leave college largely without debt. Unfortunately, the housing situation has permeated every aspect of Irish life and will affect where and what

People often stay in jobs they dislike because they want to impress other people and feel a fleeting rush of validation, which is so infantile