Kayleigh Quinn, who left school in second year<\/a> having struggled with her mental health, achieved her goal of 625 CAO points.<\/p>\nShe couldn\u2019t quite believe it. \u201cI woke up this morning and the State Examinations Commission released all the statistics before the actual results, of all the H1s going down. And I was like \u2018oh no\u2019,\u201d says the 18-year-old from Navan. \u201cI was thinking the worst case and I was doing the maths in my head, and I was trying to imagine. And then I opened it up and oh my gosh.<\/p>\n
\u201cI screamed and my parents probably thought worst-case scenario, because they couldn\u2019t tell the tone of the scream. My mum is in tears. She can\u2019t talk,\u201d Quinn says of her parents\u2019 reaction to discovering their daughter had achieved her goal. \u201cI put in the work and I suppose it paid off in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quinn\u2019s mental health in her early teens deteriorated to the point where she spent some time in Temple Street Hospital. She says that while there a comment from a psychiatrist, \u201cwell, we don\u2019t expect you do your Junior Cert\u201d, spurred her on to take control of her own education. Two months before the exams were due to start, she decided to sit them as an external student.<\/p>\n
The experience gave her the confidence to take on the Leaving Cert.<\/p>\n
She studied the Leaving Cert course through online grinds, which she worked to pay for, and through the use of free online teaching videos on YouTube. She even used ChatGPT to talk her through some maths methods and solutions that she was finding difficult to grasp. \u201cThe entire curriculum is online and you can access it on the government website \u2026 and the exam papers are up for free.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now Quinn has some decisions to make.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did my HPAT. I got those results and I have a good chance of getting into [medicine] in Ireland. So I have to think \u2013 Ireland or England. Quinn already had the offer of a place to study medicine in the UK, pending her Leaving Cert results. I think I\u2019ve got five days once round one [CAO] offers come out to make my decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
For other students who have found the school system didn\u2019t work for them, Quinn has this advice. \u201cDon\u2019t succumb to external pressure. You know yourself, more than any teacher does, more than even your parents do, if school isn\u2019t for you. Don\u2019t try and force yourself to conform to the system. Because, while it\u2019s designed to work for the majority of students, there will always be people at the very end of the bell curve who it doesn\u2019t work for.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s okay. You don\u2019t have to put yourself down. You don\u2019t have to look at others and think, \u2018oh, why are they able to go to school and be normal, and why not me?<\/p>\n
\u201cTry and focus on figuring out your interests. Try to get work experience. Get out into the world and make friends. Really find out what interests you and then get a path to it and work towards it bit by bit. There\u2019s a path for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, it\u2019s about the celebrations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so proud of my friends, They did really well as well,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
So will she head out tonight? \u201cI don\u2019t know, I\u2019ve got work tomorrow. I\u2019m sure they\u2019ll understand if I come in hanging,\u201d she says laughing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The results are in and, for one student \u2013 who was one of our Leaving Cert diarists in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,14331,12552,18,19,17,12550,12551,1420],"class_list":["post-649089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-cao","tag-classroom-to-college","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-leaving-certificate","tag-second-level","tag-students"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117133695193751799","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}