I took my A levels around 15 years ago. Some of the grades were based on AS level results. Knowing these rules I worked hard for the previous year's sets of exams too and despite flagging a bit at the end I achieved top grades. Attending independent school and having private tuition and lots of support from grandparents as well as parents, and of course the local library, I worked hard and was able to sail through without distraction; as well as succeeding in exams I had some education in how to be happy and some extra curricular activities and activism.
I had an offer from Durham and a lower offer from Nottingham Uni, but I already had my heart set on Nottingham. We had a wonderful professor there who later joined the royal society as a fellow. Nottingham was not too far and often my friends with cars would let me hitch a ride, often arriving to my door at the bottom of the M1 in a couple of hours without even a break. Sometimes I would get the train or hitchhike, and I visited London for national demostrations, and meetings of the Board of Deputies or UJS advanced political and educational training. - Nottingham was the biggest and fastest growing J Soc in the country at the time and was the campus where Limmud took place. Being in the Midlands also allowed me to travel the country and experience the UK beyond London, more directly. It was also, I'm told, less costly than living as a student in central London, while being able to live outside my parents home for the course.
I graduated into a recession and financial crisis triggered by sub prime mortgages, and struggled to get my foot on the job ladder, moved back to my parents, and volunteered in a charity shop for Age UK / Help the Aged. I volunteered for Caroline Lucas' successful election campaign and to re-elect Green councillors, as elections and campaigns officer on the national committee of the Young Greens, England & Wales, and was involved in the London Young Greens and local Green Party here in the Borough of Barnet. After attending a Jobcentre course, I got my own gardening business off the ground.
Thanks to my science background - GCSEs, A-Levels, and my B.Sc. - I was able to get into my chosen career of horticulture - with fees paid for by my family, and did some work experience on the course at Avenue House, a local stately home and arboretum. I've always loved trees - and my plans to carry on with my degree subject, I later saw as unrealistic. Though vocational qualifications in the UK are lower status than a degree, there was an over-supply of graduates in the job market and underqualified perhaps, I am always able to find work with my BTEC and though I now get offered employment in many locations, I turn down these offers to work self-employed as my own boss, my own way.
If I was hiring some staff in the gardening business who might want to make their own career in that field, I could do so one day a week as part of the BTEC course with accreditation in the practical side of things. I realise my back and knees aren't always going to be as strong as younger garden labourers - but the best way to get ahead in the gardening trade is to also teach practical and business tasks to a trainee.
In the summer before Uni, I seriously considered going straight to work in a trade after meeting an electrician on my travels. Probably for class reasons, my grandparents dissuaded me from dropping out. I did have to drop down from 4 to 3 years of Uni partly due to lack of enough income, and partly because I wanted to do something new. It might have been cheaper to go to college and get a trade before university in later life, who knows! But it was partly my science discipline that I had on my CV that made me a good candidate to study horticulture.
Over the years I have come to become suspicious of mortgages (maybe because of the 2009 crash). My boss after college actually passed away shortly after having paid off his mortgage. At university I went in quite sexist and snobbish, and left less so, and less keen to work for British Petroleum or in polluting chemical industries. I wanted to do something to make the world a better place and realised that maybe the best thing would be to do something that kept me going and surviving, while able to devote some spare time to activism and things worth doing. I was very lucky that I've been given the chance to do a job that I love and am in many ways, in my ideal job. People at the agency placement I worked at temporarily says I'd have to be mad to give that up and work for them.
