Choosing your GCSE options (video)

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CHOOSING YOUR GCSE OPTIONS

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I wasn’t allowed to choose what I wanted to do because my dad kind of came in bosh and said, “This is what you have to do.” I think I wanted to do art, English, history, classics, woodwork for some reason and something else and my dad wasn’t having it and said I had to do maths and I had to do French and I had to do all these sciences.

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I was fortunate enough to go to a school that allowed you to you know choose whatever subjects you wanted to study without being forced, OK you have to become a scientist or you have to become an art student and, that very much fits with my personality as I’ve said, I like to study a broad range of subjects and I never liked to constrict myself. So I was very lucky through my schooling to be able to turn my hand to a number of different subjects.

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I was a bit difficult at school. I choose subjects I was interested in rather than ones that I thought I was going to ‘do me good’ particularly for my GCSEs I chose just what I felt like doing which then unfortunately meant that I had very small number of options left at A Level because a lot of the things I did at GCSE my school didn’t do at A Level. So I was left doing A Levels that I perhaps wasn’t most suited to.

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When I was at school I said I would like to do what I’m comfortable with and through of course teachers guiding me, you know, “What do you enjoy, what do you like?” and I was very lucky to have teachers like that, rather than sort of propose what they thought I would be good at. So of course I liked textiles, I enjoyed art, I took all those as GCSEs and then followed through to A Levels.

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Like when I was at school I was very interested in subjects such as maths and science, along with electronics and then went on and took electronics as one of my options in high school.

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I actually chose for my GCSEs to study digital graphics and in doing that I found animation and the teacher was really good for me and said you know, “You can carry on doing this if you want and just do it for your GCSE” so I did and I loved it.

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I did feel like teachers were trying to get me to choose my GCSEs based on what I wanted to be and that really freaked me out cos I thought, “I don’t know”.

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I did some sciences, I did some arts, did one language that’s probably the one I wasn’t so good at. I really wish I’d spent more time on my French lessons because certain being able to speak a second language has on occasions I think held me back.

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