Undermyskin said:
Is it truly over-rated? I mean...I hear people whinging about the amount of time they've been spending on their studies and then as you guys say, judging it as not as hard or difficult.
It's perfectly understandable to such things when you already HAD your goal achieved.
Well, to get a high UAI, obviously we have to sacrifice something and of course we are at times stressed a lot. Still when having st like 99 or above in your profiles, you don't have to worry about which courses will reject your applies or you can't get into any Uni. (even Medicine at UNSW can still offer you an interview with UAI of 97 or 98 is you have extremely high UMAT. Another way out!) So, you should aim high actually.
I feel most heavy-hearted when looking at the results of 2007 HSC students. Perhaps checking these marks out just makes any of us either more terrified or more jealous. 100 UAI, 99.95 UAI WOW. And reading their interviews just freaks me out. Yeah, Comparing you to other people is futile but noone can help doing so.
Can I ever survive??? =((
Something that took me a long time to realise is the HSC is overrated in terms of what it will do to your life. However what it is is one number that will be a reflection of two years of working, and everyone wants to look back and be happy with that number.
Will you care about that number in 15 years? Hell no, but you care about it now and will probably care about it for the next 2/3 years. So its worth making an effort because its real.
Those people who are posting on those UAI/HSC results with all those high marks are a small percentage. These people are ecstatic with their results and want to tell the world, people not so ecstatic are less likely to spend their summer on a forum posting their results.
Year 12 will be insane, it will be a very social year and be a very academic year. Everyone has a massive 18th and everyone gets drunk.
As for all those success stories, having known personally some of those success stories, you only ever hear the good and how wonderful they worked. They never report those times when they got a bad mark and had a cry on a friends shoulder, or when they got dumped or procrastinated and couldn't work no matter how hard they tried. Or felt lonely because they didn't go to another 18th because there's a big assessment task coming.
They never report those things, because those things would make those super freaky 100 students normal
couldn't have that, could we