Thoughts on failing

I've been thinking a bit about someone recently.

In first year, when I was living in halls of residence, I might have mentioned that I lived with an Irishman, who was originally from Carlow.

Sophistication wasn't exactly his middle name, and it wasn't long before he had got an (albeit fairly harmless) reputation as a bit of a muck savage. However, it became obvious over time that good-naturedness wasn't a trait intrinsic to his personality either, and as time went on, he began to alienate the irish students in the pharmacy class one by one, and upto a point where we had agreed to disagree on a couple of things, I was one of them. By the end of first year, most of his so-called fellow countrymen were having very little to do with him.

It's pretty difficult to come over to the UK from Ireland to study pharmacy and not fall in with a group of friends, such is the number of Irish people coming over here to study for that degree, yet he managed it.

When we returned last autumn to proceed into second year, we all noticed, as time went on, that he was keeping very much to himself, hanging out only with the international students in the class, and probably nursing a grudge against the Irish crowd for the way things had turned out. We were all a bit nonplussed, as by then we had all decided that if he wanted to start over, that would be fine. But he didn't.

He wasn't the most gifted student in the class by a long way, and at times I wondered what kind of role he would be able to take up when (if) he graduated. It turns out I was being optimistic, as he failed his summer exams (4 of them), and was not given the option to repeat them.

One of the things I've noticed about the faculty of pharmacy department over here is that if you fall foul of the end of year exams, sometimes the faculty can decide, where you have failed coursework or clinical exams, that you don't get a chance to resit them in the autumn, and if you're really unlucky, that you don't get a chance to do them ever again, i.e. you get thrown off the course. The latter scenario was what ended up being played out for Martin, and in spite of him attempting to appeal the decision made by the board of examiners, he was out.

I can't fault the board entirely, because he would have been at best a very mediocre pharmacist, no matter what area he would have ended up going into. The reason I do feel sorry for him is that he had spent quite a few years, prior to his entry onto this course, just trying to get in. Ideally his unsuitability should have been spotted sooner, and some advice or help offered. Also, he has spent quite a bit of money getting as far as he did, and now it's all for nothing. I've spent quite a bit of money myself already, getting this far, and I'd die if that happened to me.

One of the big motivating factors for people to go back to college as mature students is a substantial dislike for the kind of job you had before, and that is the way it was with me. I gathered, from various conversations, that it was also the way with him. Now he has to go back to that.

That kind of failure is more than a little difficult to take when you're a little bit older than the average young twenty-something. All I can say is that if that had happened to me, the way forward afterwards would be more than a little unclear. Thank God it didn't.