Leaving Certificate Engineering

Liam - Engineering Higher Level 

As I woke up this morning I tried to ignore the feeling of dread I felt. Thursday was the day I feared the most. Not because of the thought of having to sit down and do English paper two in the evening, but for the engineering paper in the morning.Now I’m sure a few of you reading this are asking “what’s so hard about engineering, it’s one of the easiest subjects out there?” Sure, this may be the case for some, but for my class and me, it wasn't. The theory paper on the engineering course covers 50% of your overall mark while there’s 25% for your project and 25% for your practical. We only started doing theory two weeks ago! Yes you heard correctly! We only started to learn an entire course two  weeks ago. What did we do in fifth year? What did we do for all of sixth year? We just practiced for our practical the entire time. To anybody out there who is reading and this sounds familiar, start studying now!A few of you, I'm sure, are probably all wondering what my teacher was doing, not teaching us and all, but to be totally honest, he knew his stuff. For the last 45 years he has been teaching in my school, I don’t think anyone has failed the engineering paper. I got the surprise of my life when I went in and found that the paper was actually quite easy! With only two weeks of work with things I had never seen before I was fairly confident. We have a compulsory question for question 1 (a question about common sense) and we must answer four others out of 7. Within the first two hours I had my five questions answered and I was flying it. I even answered the others for the craic!So there you go. I'm really quite delighted to be honest. One more exam down to the whoppa sesh!Please note: blog posts reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily the opinion of the Irish Second-Level Students’ Union. Blogs are updated daily by 6.30 pm on scheduled examination dates.Zeminar is an event for Generation Z, particularly those aged between 15 and 19, and their parents, teachers, mentors and coaches. It will take place from 11th - 13th of October 2016. For more information see www.zeminar.ie