For the past eight years I’ve been a permanent lecturer in the National College of Art and Design. That’s my full-time job and I love it. But when I was seventeen I applied here and didn’t get in. I’m happy to share this fact with colleagues or students if it comes up, but it almost never does. Because my focus was on making a portfolio, how many points I got in my Leaving Cert wasn’t the ordeal for me that it is for many Irish students. Still, I know how it feels to open a letter with what feels like your whole future inside, and for it to hold bad news.I’d wanted to go to NCAD ever since I learned, aged thirteen, that there was such a thing as art college (somewhere you could go and draw all day!). My mother pointed it out to me as we drove into Dublin via Thomas Street, the thick lettering on the redbrick facade. I pictured women with long hair dreamily sketching Grecian urns. When I visited for a summer course two years later it was so much better, sprawling outside sketching with my new friends until the attendants yelled at us to get out, wandering through the library humming with the wellbeing of a room full of beautifully illustrated books. I’d never felt so much like I already belonged somewhere while wanting desperately to belong there at the same time. I worked on my portfolio in the summers and the evenings of my Leaving Cert year while my classmates were studying French and physics. If I wasn’t accepted, I didn’t want to know that I should have worked harder. I hoped my passion would come across in the thirty seconds or so I’d heard the tutors took to flick through our books and make up their minds. On a Monday in early March I rang home on first break in school, stepping into a cloakroom off the main hall. “It’s here,” my mum said when she answered the phone. Then there was nothing but the sound of rustling paper and the din of girls moving on the corridors on either side of the darkened space I sat in. There was a long pause as she struggled to assimilate what the letter said and eventually her voice from what felt like a long way away, saying “wait-listed”. It was a possibility that hadn’t crossed my mind when I’d agonised over a letter winging its way to me with a big yes or no. I felt an awful denial then, a sense that if I hung up the phone and rang back or if I hadn’t asked her to open the envelope that I could change what was written there. “I worked so hard” I remember saying, aloud and in my head, as though this might also be enough to change something. Even in the messy crying hours afterwards I knew this was what we’d now call a “teachable moment”. I’d tried my best. It hadn’t been enough. There had never been any guarantees that it would be. Worse still, it felt more like a verdict on me as a person. Some people were talented and good enough and even with hard work I was not. Now I would never be the person I had hoped to become. I think this is exactly what Leaving Certificate and CAO results can feel like: not just information on where we will go to college, but a referendum on our worth at the very moment we are trying to become who it is we hope to be. This is where I’m supposed to tell you I’m so glad I didn’t get what I wanted more than twenty years ago, because something better was waiting for me. I’m not going to patronise any young adults who might have strayed here with that guff. I was accepted and went to a different art college. It wasn’t some wonderful blessing in disguise. I sort of hated it. Was the lesson that art school was never for me? Maybe. But even that feels a bit too neat. By my final year I’d realised I was more drawn to writing and the books in the library than in making art myself. I might have discovered the same thing in a different school. Or taken a different path. I might have thrived studying English in UCD. Or Maths in Maynooth.Exterior of the National College of Art and Design, Thomas St, Dublin. Photograph: Alan Betson [ CAO points system cannot be used to measure intelligenceOpens in new window ]Where my teenage self believed there was one road to the life I wanted, today I can imagine any number of paths that might lead to the life I now have and to work I love that rewards me every day. What I studied as an undergraduate, and where, would be one small piece in that story. I read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library in 2020, a book about a woman who gets to access other versions of her life. Most intriguingly, she gets to go back and undo her past regrets. Maybe some of us still wish we had got those Leaving Cert points or acceptance to that course. Haig urges us to give up the fantasy that some perfect life exists where the right thing happened or we made the right decision. A disappointing result hurts. And it matters, of course it does. It might alter where we go next. What we can’t know today is how little authority one result has over everything that comes afterwards. I’m writing this as I get ready to begin another semester in NCAD. Each year I get older. Each year the incoming students stay the same age (now that’s unfair). When I was their age I thought one letter had decided my future. It only told me what would happen next. [ Covid impacts and enhanced grades: five takeaways from 2026 Leaving Cert resultsOpens in new window ]