BellTIME attend, take a roll or even can cut your grant if don’ t show up; and for others with small classes you will be missed. But generally you are looked upon as an adult and are free to come and go, but you are expected to keep up with the work.
BellTIME attend, take a roll or even can cut your grant if don’ t show up; and for others with small classes you will be missed. But generally you are looked upon as an adult and are free to come and go, but you are expected to keep up with the work.
Level of Work Along with coping with this freedom and doing all this work there is the level of work involved. You know the step up in learning you had to take from Junior Cert to Leaving Cert, well now at third level there is an even bigger step. As we mentioned doing English in school you might cover a poem or two by Keats, in college you will study all of Keats poetry, or Dicken’ s novels or read Proust, Goethe or Cervantes in the original language. You move from just knowing things to understanding things, debating and arguing, analysing and creating. So you can’ t just learn it off or get the notes or spoof your way through, you will need to do hard, demanding and intellectually and creatively challenging work.
Living and working away from home Along with the freedom, increased workload and independent learning you might have to do a lot of this away from home. Yes this is appealing to be away from the constraints of home but it is not without its difficulties. So along with not having the structure of the school to support you, the support of home can also be absent. So you have to organise your own accommodation, sign leases and agreements, negotiate relationships with fellow tenants and organise factors like electricity, broadband, refuse and transport.
Are you ready for all this? Moving to college is a challenge and you should be preparing for it if it is on your radar. If you want a quick test of whether you are prepared for college or not, consider how you react on a night when you have no homework. Do you cheer and go off to catch up with your soaps and football or do you cheer and say“ Great, this gives me on opportunity to catch up on and explore these topics I’ m interested in!”
Can you work and study when given the freedom not to do it is the key test.
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