The Journey to Lancaster

“Under no circumstances mention Dylan Thomas”. This was the very first piece of advice I was given as a sixth form student about to write her personal statement. “And certainly don’t make out you’re a humble country bumpkin”. Selling myself. That was the biggest problem; making myself sound like a worthy and interesting student without lying was harder than walking into Mordor. I had to resist the urge to write “I am Amy Boucher – poet, heavy metal fan, history geek, a vegetarian obsessed with Dylan Thomas, Buddha and Tolkien. I like to bake and read. Please let me come to your university, I will be ever so good. Honest.”

[Image unavailable - this media was lost during migration]Please note – as of yet, the Chaplaincy Centre DOES NOT have its very own eye of Sauron – Original image by PixelBrain

But I didn’t. I kept my eccentricities under wrap and when the time came to click the send button, I was almost a mess. My head was a twisting tumult of questions. Had I really just applied to university? What if they didn’t like me? Had I made the right choices? And finally, did I have realistic expectations of university? Probably not, as to me the word invoked the image of a Hogwarts like building, lots of people doing things that adults would deem ‘unconventional’ or even ‘ outrageous’, Trotsky types, discussions about literature and copious amounts of cold baked beans. But that all changed with a visit to Lancaster University, which brought me back down to a (pleasant) kind of reality, making me realise I wanted to spend the next 3 years there. It just meant getting the grades.

Ever the pessimist, I believed that I was doomed to failure, but after sleepless nights spend studying Berkoff and his role in theatre, an enjoyable philosophy exam in which I wrote 26 pages, a 2000 word essay on Alfred the Great, learning to spell and a comparison between Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and Lord Byron’s ‘When We Two parted’ (desperate at the time, brilliant in retrospect), it was over. On the 16th of August I was surprised to see that the fairies had put good grades in the dull, brown envelope. That was the only explanation for it. A perfectly reasonable one.

After the euphoria and the celebratory mead had worn off, next came the realities. I had never really been a fan of reality, and learning to ‘cook’ (or burn, in my case) almost proved too much. It wasn’t like baking. Another scary idea was “budgeting”, which I learnt meant that I couldn’t spend all of my money on ingredients for baking, heavy metal CDs and LOTR Lego sets. I also experienced an unfortunate mishap where the bank believed I was 6 months younger than I actually was, but that’s another story.

But I’ve done it. I have managed to get into a university, even though I am obsessed with Dylan Thomas and can quote LOTR, and in a few weeks time I can call myself a student. As for my expectations, they are less naïve now, and involve less baked beans, but are high.

Unfortunately, we have lost track of who originally wrote this article, as it did not have any author information..

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