Fucking up my year, a simple mistake worth avoiding

Birch Tales
2 min readAug 21, 2024
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

The 3 years of my dreams seemed so close I didn’t bother considering failure. Who needs plan B if plan A is so simple? Wandering the narrow streets of Venice I already pictured myself rushing to lectures across the elegant bridges and between eye-catching shops. The only doubt running through my head was whether the heat would go down by the time studies start.

I had already taken the entrance exam a couple months before and passed but didn’t realise I needed to pay the entrance fee on time. A mistake that is laughably on brand for and wasn’t catastrophic as I could simply retake the exam in August and do everything right.

After bragging about my future to anyone that would listen and spending more time making flash cards that the 1 hour test warranted the fateful day finally came. I borrowed a heavy PC from a friend that made it look more like a drug deal by handing me a backpack through her card window, cleaned my room (that would have to be scanned by the university’s app to make sure no one is sitting under my table and giving me answers) and opened the email…

I am happy that English doesn’t have as many swear words as my native tongue, or this article would have been much longer.

The exam was supposed to start at 10am, 5 hours before I even opened the email. I had this time…

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