Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

I am getting top grades easily but Paralysed with personal statement/uni choice

Hello.

TL;DR: I am struggling to choose a uni path, how did you choose yours?

I am a mature student doing Access Course, so maybe the reason I have been getting full marks is that they are easier than A level, yet, please, could you please let know how easy are you finding it writing your personal statement? How did you choose your Uni course?

For Access, I chose Humanities, because I was scared of how hard the tutor had said it was going to be, so I thought: since I am a bookworm, I better choose a 'safer path', subjects in which you have to read a lot rather than, say, studying a new subject like Law and finding it boring, or studying Biology and find it difficult (last time I studied biology was at age 13 and it was easy at all, but I find Math extremely boring).

So here I am now, on the 26th of December, paralysed with my personal statement.

I am also a superficial kind of person, I'd say: I find myself reading news superficially, and realise that I have lost years just mindlessly scrolling social media instead of devoting myself to a specific subject.
This of course makes it harder to write a personal statement: I cannot write about how I know "a little bit" of "various things".

I thought of choosing History, because it is interesting, and almost a requirement to be a better citizen/person (driven by the BLM), but if I think about 15th century, I find myself not really intrigued. I mean, it is fascinating, but I would rather study it via its culture (life style, language, artefacts) than its socio-political-economic evolution because "who cares" (among the hamsters in my brain? Nobody).
I'd rather study more modern courses, yet all unis I have access to (I have to stay in London for financial reasons) force you to study ancient times too. I also see no much point in studying history because I would like in the future work in advertising, in promoting things. I enjoy that creative side of advertising. It seems a difficult field to get into and that it requires lots of hours of work, so not the ideal, but still. It's my idealised dream.
Other options I am intriguied about are publishing (publicist still) and communications department within a business.

I also asked myself: which subject you enjoy revising for?
We have only done one module for History, all about the Civil right movement. I got D for the two required assessments, yet I basically did not read the latest recommended readings (and I was able to get the top grade because I had payed attention in class and the essay it's only 1500 for almost 20 years of history so there was no need to go into detail on the last 5 years).

Reply 1

lemonadetea

Have you spoken to a careers adviser or tutor about this?

Reply 2

think_patronus

Omg thank you so much for answering lemonadetea <3

Yes, a bit, but I feel that my nervousness and anxiety made me talk as if I was more interested than what I truly am, just because I felt bad about sounding indecisive. I felt like I should be doing some kind of homework that would lead me to the correct answer, the same way I had to do a lot of self-studying to get the answers for my essays. My job as a student is to get that extra research done.

I keep reading the list of modules described in the uni websites, but mostly these are "lists", so with little info about what they actually entail. I keep opening tabs from the "subject list" at each uni (UCL and Kings, for example) and try to read what they say about the course, but they are not enough for me. I have read that History requires you to do more exams than coursework, and I have performed poorly at exams (I got a 6 for my GCSE English exam).

Yet, during my GCSE English I felt such an hunger for it. Now, I have to force myself to to the work and find no real excitement. I only found excitement when, after days of struggling, I wrote a paragraph for my Lit essay in a way that made me feel so smart (lol), like I had mastered the language/perspective needed for the analysis. Another time was when, after struggling to grasp them, I understood the sociology theories/concepts: I enjoyed (because I like writing) re-elaborate those concepts in the essay, to explain them in my own words.

While I did not found much stimulation in writing History: I felt I was just being argumentative and so superficial, yet my tutor told me that it was almost undergrad material (he is also a sixth form history teacher).