I started this blog because I'm on a gap year and I thought other people, who are considering taking a gap year might want to read it.
So why did I take a gap year?? Before I started thinking about university, I was very anti gap years. I always thought, they were a waste of time and money and I just couldn't see the point in taking one when you could be doing more useful things. What made me change my mind was when I'd done my AS-level exams and I knew my maths exams had gone badly, because I want to be a lawyer and I wanted to be at one of the universities that are in the top 20, and when I began to look at the prospectuses for universities in that category I learnt that they all wanted 3 As for prospective law students, unless they were scottish universities but since I don't want to be a lawyer in Scotland, that just wasn't an option for me. But I knew I'd have to take a gap year, when the maths department wouldn't predict me anything higher than a D.
Although I knew I wasn't going to get anything much in terms of offers from good universities, I applied anyway just to see what I would get. I got an offer from UWE, and that was the only university out of my original options that gave me an offer but I didn't want to go there so I declined eventually it and applied to the University of Hull through UCAS extra. I did this purely as a measure of how good I was but I didn't really want to go there either, I said I'd go there if I failed to get the required grades for the top universities but even when I got A, B, C on results day, I couldn't stand the idea of going there because I knew I could do better. So eventually I sent them an e-mail declining the place. So at the moment I'm finishing off my A-level in Latin and I'm doing some January retakes.
All the same when I realised I might have to take a gap year, I realised that there could be advantages to it and that really how worthwhile it is depends on how worthwhile you make it. One of the first things I thought of doing was of course A-Level Latin, this is useful to me as a prospective lawyer because a lot of legal terms are in Latin, so it'll come in use for my law degree. But I also realised I could gain some useful work experience because before this year the only work experience I had ever done was for one week in a solicitor's office. So currently I'm doing voluntary work for one day a week at the Citizen's Advice Bureau and it's really useful, I'm gaining insight into Employment Law, Criminal Law and other sorts of law. I am however also considering doing some work experience in the courts, because when I visited the courts for a day before going back to school for the last year it was actually quite interesting to see how the judges worked within the boundaries of common law and how they passed decided what sentences to pass for each case.
Nevertheless that doesn't mean there aren't disadvantages to taking gap years in the way I'm taking mine. Because now I'm not on a school timetable it's really hard to motivate myself, I seem to do everything at snail's pace. This is no joke I've sometimes taken two days over homeworks (and these weren't essays) that should have taken a day. This is partly because I wake up at 12:00/13:00 and so I seem to spend half the afternoon having breakfast/lunch. The other disadvatantage is that most of my friends have gone off to university and so as a countryside dweller I don't have many people my age around me.
On this blog I'm going to record what I'm doing on my gap year, how I get on with university offers and how I get on with other aims of my gap year. Because since I'm currently an agnostic, I'd really like to come to a conclusion on whether there is or isn't a God even if in reality we are all agnostics. The other target I've set for myself is to read all the books I've accumulated in my bookshelves but haven't read, so you might find a few book reviews here. You might also find me blogging about the news since I love
current affairs.
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