I’ll stop being so vague about what was my big irresponsibility. It’s nothing shocking, and also it is a choice everybody has to make after they finish high school. Yeah, that is the grand “what the heck now?” question. I knew I was going to go to university, there really wasn’t any other choice for me, as I am far too cowardly to try something that isn’t as highly respected by the society and my family, and also because I am one of these odd people who actually like learning. So my initial plan was to go to the United Kingdom and study History. I actually had a place in a university, I even had a room at a dorm, I only had to pay some of the boarding fee and send in my high school diploma.
I suppose it’s pretty clear by now that I did not do that.
I think it was either my mom or my sister, or maybe both, that suggested I apply for uni in my homeland (Lithuania, if anyone cares). Now, the procedure is fairly easy – you only have to sign up online and choose what you’d like to study, your exam results are already in their system. We've also got this thing where government covers the cost of your studies if you have good marks. I obviously only applied for the covered places. The course I now do was my fourth choice and I wasn’t really happy when I got in. Yeah.
Anyway, I don’t think I would have applied to home unis if I hadn't gone to visit my future university. Which I liked. I liked the city. I hated what they said I could do after I finish my course. At the time, my dreams of becoming a real writer had been written off quite a while before, since I wasn’t really focusing on what I loved at the time.
Getting back to the application – I wrote whatever rubbish I could come up with. Like, really. My criteria were “could I be bothered to study this?” Also, will this be in the capital of my country? The second thing wasn’t really wise, so I was lucky I got only the fourth choice, because my uni is rated highest in the country by student satisfaction (hint: are the professors good? do they care? is the course interesting? does the uni engage with its students? will you want to drop out?), which is, to be fair, more important than any other factor, but of course, it’s not the only one to be considered. It’s also pretty good at languages, social sciences and what not, and if it were located in the capital, I sure as heck wouldn’t have gotten in. Because I didn’t study for my exams, because I didn’t need very high scores for the UK, so I scored averagely. And as I only chose government-covered studies, I needed good results. Good thing second language exam was really important (*cough cough English*), and it was my strong subject.
But my point is that by being irresponsible I ended up making a few pretty smart choices, even though they were quite incidental at the time. I chose the course to study based on what I found interesting and what I was good at, also, I was particular that the course be something I had not mastered already, which is why I didn’t apply for English, even though that would have made for a really easy time. Funny thing is I might not have gotten in, because English Philology is obscenely popular here. Anyway, those are really important things to consider while choosing your future studies, because you will spend a lot of time on that. And if you have no natural abilities for it or find it utterly boring, you will suffer.
Not to say that I haven’t suffered with my French Philology. I often repeat that if I knew just how hard it was going to be, I wouldn’t have applied. I’m glad I didn’t though, because I really love my course – even though I have to learn the language from scratch, study linguistics and literature which are usually the two sole subjects of a philology, and work a lot on translation – which is probably a useful thing. Who knew “useful” existed in a BA degree. (Actually, to show how I much I love it, I’ll just tell you that I was planning to drop out and study Psychology in the UK, I even had the subject on the side for a while, but I thought this was cooler.)
Even though what I really want to do is write for a living, learning a language is pretty good. And it makes for a heck of a plan B. Good thing I am real lucky when it counts (and have my family to remind me I might not be acting particularly smart).
