Bronagh Feehan
Staff Writer
I have never been a realistic person. I romanticize everything and I am usually the fool sitting with a group of friends who believes that we will all end up in careers that we are engulfed with passion by and find the soul mate we will never want to walk away from. And have them both. Together. Forever. But the past three years have been a stark process of realization for me. Laters daydreams. Hello reality. In 2008 I began my first year in Trinity. I had just completed the infamous race for points that is the Leaving Cert. Fuck what you want to do every day for the rest of your life. Fuck what values you hold important to you. Fuck what kind of person you see yourself growing to be. Points equal money. And the more points the better. The phrase “This is the hardest you will ever have to study” is one, which I thought would painfully ricochet against every wall every day for the rest of my life. It was all about study for my group of friends and I. The career we actually wanted to spend the rest of our lives working at was, honestly, an after thought. So as an eighteen year old girl with an ardent love for language and hardly any mathematical capabilities or interests I stuck Speech and Language Therapy in Trinity down on the old CAO and forgot all about it. Job done. I wasn’t the only one either. Hundreds of students around the country get caught up in the race for points, as if it guarantees us some kind of pass for a life of happiness and wealth. It doesn’t.
I never thought about not enjoying the course. Not once did it enter my naïve mind that it might not be for me. But rapidly, it became irrefutably apparent that I had absolutely no interest in it. In fact I disliked every aspect of it. But after spending a year studying for the shameful memory test that is the Leaving Cert and having two very proud parents who had spent time and money on getting me this far my heart wouldn’t tell my head to be honest and leave. The fear of going from success to failure was so all consuming that I couldn’t admit that, although I was in a position that a plethora of people would kill for, I didn’t want it. I wanted to be somewhere else entirely. I knew I didn’t want to leave Trinity though, so out of indelible fear I remained in the course. I stayed for the majority of the academic year and pretended to all the aunts and uncles, all the cousins and parent’s friends that I loved it. It wasn’t until February that it finally clicked with me that I had wasted so much time worrying about obtaining the maximum amount of points possible, that it belied what I really wanted out of life. I chose a course that would pretty much guarantee me a high paying job with generous holidays after four years of study. I wasn’t being true to myself or honest with the people who were helping me get to where they thought I wanted to be. So in a scene so clichéd it could have been taken from a movie with Meg Ryan as the leading lady, I called my mother and cried down the phone about how much I hated the world and how it had lead me to this. Her response was not what I was expecting and had I known that she would react in that way I would have made that dramatic phone call in the first month or two of first year when I knew I wasn’t happy. She simply said “I know. I know you don’t like it. Find something you do like.”
So I did. I went back to what I had always had an interest in but the lack of jobs and the long and weary (and income less) road had presaged me from. Law. I am now in third year and that phone call was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Of course I am worried about getting a job. Of course I am aware that it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get to where I want to be in this career. But I am also aware that it is what I want to be doing every day. It’s going to be a struggle but at least I’ll enjoy it. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life and what does anything else matter? I had been enthralled by everybody else’s idyllic idea of wealth and the perfect life that I forgot what I actually wanted out of a career. Who knows maybe in ten years I’ll have no job and no money and regret my decision massively, but if I have learnt anything in my time in Trinity so far, I have learnt that the biggest risks you make are always the most gratifying.
