Journey From High School

I write this blog to share some of my own experiences with readers who are currently going through the trials and tribulations of VCE® Exam and HSC® Exam, along with the horrifying dread of an unknown future that many of you may be facing at present. I was someone who had absolutely no idea what to do when I was going through the final year of my schooling education in Queensland (we were lucky enough to miss out on the exceptionally tough VCE® Exam and HSC® Exam!), and I believed that my future would hang on the balance of my final result at the end of my final high school year (our acronym up here is the ‘OP’, which scares people just as much as ‘VCE® Exam’ and ‘HSC® Exam’). I want to briefly take you through where I came from, and where I’ve ended up, in the hope that I can reassure you that your life won’t be broken or made entirely through your grades in high school. However, I do preface this discussion with the statement that it is highly important to do your best in either the VCE® Exam (http://gradready.com.au/vce) or the HSC® Exam (http://gradready.com.au/hsc) (whatever may be your particular poison at this current time), as it does make some things in your future life easier and, more importantly, will allow you to learn a lot at school that will assist you to no end through the entirety of your future.

I will now briefly describe myself personally for a moment, just to give you some context, so please excuse this fleeting indulgence. I am fortunate enough to be currently employed as a junior doctor at a hospital here in Queensland, having completed medical school last year. I have also been extensively involved in surgical, medical, and international law research, and I am near the end of a law degree that I was completing concurrently during my medical studies. Further, I have also had the opportunity to set up a successful not for profit organisation, and been involved in a few different volunteer organisations for social justice projects. I consider myself to have been very lucky with the opportunities that have allowed me to get where I am today, but I want to stress to you that I wasn’t given this through my family (I am the first to attend university in my family), nor did I enter medicine straight through high school on the back of a successful OP score.

Indeed, the truth is almost quite the opposite. The OP system scores from 1 (the best – needed for automatic entry into medicine/dentistry etc) to 25 (the lowest), and after a fairly tumultuous and emotionally difficult time in high school, I managed to scrape together an OP 7… funnily enough, it has taken me over 10 minutes to remember what I scored! A prelude to my later point, which is that your exit high school scores are not ‘the be all and end all’. An OP 7 is certainly a reasonable score, and it allowed me to apply for a Bachelor of Applied Science, so it certainly was not a disastrous result at the time; indeed, I probably defied expectations of both my parents and my teachers, as it was only two years before in grade 10 that I was told by my guidance counsellor that university probably wasn’t an option for me and that I should consider other alternatives.

Even with a reasonable score at the end of high school, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I had no family member or any other external person influencing me in any particular direction, and I certainly hadn’t yet matured enough to develop a particularly strong interest in anything – I wasn’t one of those lucky children who had wanted to be a doctor since before they could walk; in truth, I was completely lost. The only reason that I chose a Bachelor of Applied Sciences in Human Movements was that my favourite teacher was my Physical Education tutor, and he had done the same degree. Otherwise, I had no ambition for any particular career path, and I didn’t get a fantastic score in my high school results. Compared to many students studying either for the VCE® Exam or HSC® Exam at the moment, who may have a very firm career in mind, or who are doing everything they desperately can to score in the top 1-2% of the State, this I’m sure would be quite alarming.

However, as evidenced by my current situation, where I have successfully studied at a very high level and am now on the road to a career that I will thoroughly enjoy for the rest of my life, my high school results really mattered little. On hindsight, I believe that the most important years for me were in my undergraduate degree in Applied Sciences; the opportunities opened up to you by university, along with the wide range of people and teachers you will meet (DO NOT stick to your friendship groups from high school at the exclusion of all others – there are so many fantastic people to meet) is inspiring, and this is the place you can find your feet.

I want to summarise by saying that studying hard in high school is important, as you will learn things that will stick to you for the rest of your life; pieces of knowledge that may be more difficult to acquire later – such as for myself, where I am now attempting to learn a language and more history, which I didn’t do in high school. However, it is not the end of the world if you don’t get your ideal score – there are many paths that lead to a particular end goal, and if you have the determination, positive attitude, and ambition you will succeed.