By Yusuf Zubair
The envelope within which your future is effectively printed in is gripped between your anxious fingers. You open it… *sharp intake of breath*
If you’ve done just as well as you’d expected, great stuff! Happy days!
You are fortunately able to continue on the path which you had planned; you are safely and securely on course. Perhaps you’ll continue your journey in formal education and apply to attend a university or college, engage in social action on a voluntary basis, or maybe take a direct and brave leap straight into the world of work.
On the other hand, the muckier one, you may have not achieved what you’d hoped… However, you still needn’t fret and stress and spiral into an abyss of melancholy; the future isn’t all bleak! We’ve all heard the phrase: ‘As one door closes, another one opens’, and it is now more important than ever to equip oneself with this mindset.
Now, that doesn’t mean to say that we should all be happy-go-lucky and dismissive of our grades, allowing ourselves to sink into a bohemian approach to the future, after having established that it isn’t rigidly bound by our exam results.
What it does mean, however, is that just because you didn’t get the grades you wanted this time around and you can’t happily saunter in through the doors of your favourite university, there are still many options available to you.
This decisive time can be used to analyse and evaluate your characteristics, tendencies and skills; perhaps your grade U in Mathematics was as a result of procrastinated revision, or perhaps it was that your brain simply doesn’t like working with numbers.
Your ‘bad’ grade sheet can help you to identify and develop your strengths, which you can then use to pursue routes in other, new aspects of your life.
For example, many students feel restricted by textbooks, exam rooms and silence; they would rather be out in the open doing something active.
This post-results period could be used to acquire skills, gain experience; volunteer for a charity, or to muster the courage to apply for your first job, and possibly pursue a career.
So whether you have been successful in achieving to your potential or you have experienced the devastating blow of disappointment that may have come with your grade sheet, one thing is for sure, you need to sculpt and harness your physical, mental or interpersonal skills to move forwards in the best way for you.
Good luck!
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