Lucy Bowes, 29, from Cambridge, had a “gut feeling” that university wouldn’t be right for her. As thousands of A-Levels students find out their results, she tells The i Paper that even academically talented students don’t need university to succeed.
I’m the only one out of my friendship group to have not gone to university. When I was a teenager, I went to a really good sixth-form college that was basically an Oxbridge feeder school. My mum had been to teacher training college and my dad had been to agricultural college but both had always envisioned that me and my sisters would go to university. I’m the youngest – one of my sisters is both a doctor and a lawyer and the other is a teacher. Because I’d also done so well at school, it was assumed I’d go to university.
I’d always been top of my class, but midway through my second year in sixth form, I really struggled. I’d got in with a bad crowd of people and was, like a stereotypical teenager, going out a lot. I dropped out in January of Year 13 to sort myself out. I took a job at the pub and in some ways it was good – it’s how I met my husband! – but I then decided it would be a shame to not go back and finish my A-Levels.
So just as my friends were going off to uni, becoming freshers, I went back to school in September. I didn’t know a single person, which was really challenging, but it did enable me to get my head down and study hard and I did really well in the end, getting A*AA in psychology, English and Latin.
