University hangama

After a frantic day of calling and continual suspense I’ve managed to get myself into Brunel University for English. Of course, everything hasn’t been finalized, since my application has to be processed through admissions properly. Going through Clearing means that you’ve got to verbally negotiate your place over the phone, get an offer, and then wait for it to be processed onto UCAS.

While I got an email confirmation as well as a confirmation over the phone, my UCAS still doesn’t say “Accepted” since they’re still doing the paperwork. So there’s a little bit of restraint when I celebrate because it’s not fully, fully official. I’ve been reassured that I’ve got a place and just the paperwork needs to be done.

Still there’s a feeling of both exhaustion and relief. What I hated so much about the whole process was that feeling of ambiguity. You suddenly feel frozen because you don’t know what you should do because people are still planning and making decisions about you. I knew that whatever happened, whether I got in or not, I had to keep on living and doing my thing.

It was just that fucking tension of not knowing what direction you should take because some aspects of your possibilities are too busy making up their fucking mind!

This whole year has been an entire mess. There has been more people applying to university this year than any other year in British history, and to add injury to insult, universities have their funding cut by 25% so there is no places left for these people to go. Ask them to get a job? Just what jobs are you talking about because they clearly don’t exist. Those people will just go into unemployment and claim benefits costing the state even more.

UCAS clearly was affected too. There were not enough people to answer calls. I heard from someone who works inside UCAS that they experienced a full system failure for their network multiple times on the day. It’s actually a joke to expect that the UK will be able to compete in the international academic world when their own admission system is crumbling beneath their feet.

Eyes may roll, but these last few years for me have been a fight against The System. Fighting against a system means you are trying to avoid becoming a narrow statistic and attempt to become a wider, more significant statistic. (You’re still a statistic at the end of the day.) A lot of people think I’m stubborn, and this whole thing has been an exercise to gauge just how flexible I am. The answer is, I am fairly flexible, but fundamentally stubborn.