Richard Hogan: You are more than your Leaving Cert results

"Our movement through life isn’t in a straight line - more like an oscillating circle that moves up and back. At times, we feel we are going backwards or standing still but that is not true."

Richard Hogan. Photograph Moya Nolan

The CAO first round offers came out yesterday, and for many that brought incredible joy as they have been offered a place in college. 

However, for some, it meant bitter disappointment and confusion as they missed out on the college place they had their hearts set on. 

There is no doubt about it, sitting the Leaving Certificate, waiting for results, getting them and then waiting for the CAO offer is one of the most stressful things we do as young adults in this country.

And then of course there are those nosy neighbours who want to know what your child got so they can compare to their own golden child.

That’s just noise. Don’t let any of that in! Now, that the anxious wait for 62,000 students is over, the big question may be; what can someone do after missing out on a first round offer? 

Well, the first thing to do is to realise there are more offers to come. Many students don’t take up the offer they were given and therefore places come back online again. 

Don’t be overly stressed about the first round, you may get it in the second round of offers. I know it is disappointing not to get the offer in the first round, but not everything goes to plan. 

UP AND BACK

Our movement through life isn’t in a straight line, it is more like what Carl Jung said, it’s the circumambulation of the self, an oscillating circle that moves up and back and up and back. At times we feel we are going backwards or standing still but that is not true.

When I think of my own life, there were many moments I didn’t get what I was after. I felt like I had failed somehow. I didn’t hit what I was aiming for. But as I look at it now, many years from those moments I can clearly see all the bounty that came into my life.

At one point I stopped going to college to help my mother with my grandmother after she broke her hip. I clearly remember feeling like a ‘dropout’, working in a bookshop and helping my grandmother convalesce. But that bookshop introduced me to a girl working across the way.

We now have three beautiful daughters, and I went back to college when my grandmother improved and everything moved in the right direction.

As I look at that time now, I realise how special it was, my relationship with my grandmother deepened in a way I find difficult to articulate. If everything had gone as I had planned it, how dull would my life have been. 

I would have finished college a couple of years earlier but never met the girl that became my wife! And all those beautiful daughters would disappear. This column too, because it was my wife who encouraged me to pursue my love of psychology.

NEVER STUCK

It is very easy to get caught thinking we have failed and to view everyone else as moving forward while we are stuck. But that is not true. We are never stuck.

We need young adults to understand every moment we miss something, more moments of landing on something open up for us. So, acknowledge the disappointment today, and then strategise, recalibrate and figure out how you are going to get to where you want to go.

I worked with a wonderful student a couple of years ago. She always dreamed of becoming a doctor. She worked incredibly hard towards that goal, achieved a wonderful Leaving Certificate result but her Health Professionals Admissions Test results let her down. She didn’t get in.

She tried a different course, but attempted the test again, and once again her score let her down. She refused to give up and in her third attempt she got the score she needed to get into medicine. She sent me a beautiful message and a picture of herself walking into the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

With enough determination we all can get to where we want to go. 

There is a place for all of us in society but it might take a little circuitous route to get there. Students get caught thinking ‘I want to go to University College Dublin with all my friends and then I’ll go on my J1 and it will all move like I want it to’. 

But it doesn’t always go like that and you must be able to move with how things have gone with your results.

Remember the Leaving Certificate results do not speak to who you are or what you are capable of, they are just results from an exam. There are huge external factors at play in those exam results, predictive grades that inflated the system, how you answered the question and the marking scheme, the teacher that corrected it on the day, and Bell’s Curve. 

All of these factors impact on your result, so do not internally attribute the outcome as some sign of your lack of intelligence, because you do not know what that is yet.

True intelligence is found when our passion meets our focus, then you start to see what you are capable of. Whatever the outcome yesterday, remember you are far more than those results or seats in college.