Adia’s “Resurrect your grades that wilted and died” Blog!!

Hello whoever is reading this!


I am a resident lurker here on TSR with only a handful of posts and some thread starters. Despite this I am on here very often than it seems and I come here for motivation a lot! So here is some information about me. I am currently in a gap year retaking my a levels for exams this June. Last year I was a medical school applicant and had my whole being set on becoming a doctor. I got an offer from Imperial College (!!!) which was my dream uni and I was over the moon. Then the best moments of my life were promptly followed by the worst as I went on to butcher my exams and come out with BBCC (maths biology chemistry and economics). Needless to say I wasn’t accepted by imperial or my insurance choice (Warwick for Biochemistry which I wouldn’t have gone to). As you may already know applying for medicine is a difficult and gruelling process. With my grades only about two unis would possibly give me an offer. The rest didn’t accept retakes. The chances of me getting a place were so tiny that I had to give up reapplying. To say I was gutted would be an understatement.

A lot has happened between then and now and I have had to find a new career path and apply to uni again. I have accepted what happened and I am hell-bent on identifying and fixing the mistakes I made last year. But it is still hard for me. I would like this blog to be motivation for me to stay on track, and also to reach out to people like me.

So, about me:





As I said before I received BBCC respectively at the end of year 13. Right now I am studying from home and sitting Maths, Biology and Chemistry again as a private candidate. I am doing the entire a levels again, excluding the practicals (and that horrific maths coursework.)
I am aiming for AAB, which are my predicted grades, though I would like to do better.

The course I have applied for is... Computer Science! Weird I know seeing as I am a biology nerd, but I just knew that going down something else in the health field that wasn’t medicine would leave me unsatisfied and feeling like I was settling for less. So I avoided that completely. I also kind of have to study something that has a known career at the end because of my parents. So computer science it was.

I’d had some experience of html before applying but that was literally it, and since September last year I have been teaching myself loads about computer science. It’s really interesting and has all things I think I will enjoy in a degree: logic, lots of knowledge to learn, and maths. A lot like medicine actually.

My UCAS application:



This is a long post... anyway right now I am revising content and going over textbook and old lesson questions. I was meant to start past papers at the beginning of April but my revision hasn’t been going so well. And by not going well I mean it crashed completely and I am nowhere near reaching my goal of ‘going over everything at least once to refresh my memory from last june’. I didn’t flop last year for no reason, I guess. Old habits die hard.

ANYWAY I will make another post soon about my plan and how I am doing. I would like to post in the morning what I am going to do for the day and then come back in the evening to see whether I have done it. I would like to put as much pressure on myself as possible.

If you are retaking exams too, studying from home or applying for computer science, tell me on here!

Adia

Weird I know seeing as I am a biology nerd, but I just knew that going down something else in the health field that wasn’t medicine would leave me unsatisfied and feeling like I was settling for less. So I avoided that completely. I also kind of have to study something that has a known career at the end because of my parents. So computer science it was.

There's a lot of really interesting overlap between the biosciences and computer science, such as building energy-efficient computers based on neural networks and the fascinating work of the Human Brain Project - is that something you're interested in?