After the blow of not winning a scholarship, I felt resentment building up about English Literature. I had read everything, and worked so hard, but it had not been enough. Not knowing anything about Dweck and ‘Growth Mindset,’ I declared that English was ‘not my thing,’ and proceeded to throw myself into other aspects of university life.

And third year was in some ways a really wonderful year. I worked for the university newspaper, and for the first time my work felt purposeful. I wasn’t serving drinks to make a pittance, and I wasn’t slaving over books to fail to win a scholarship. I was writing, writing, writing and copy editing; spending whole days and whole nights in the newspaper office over a production weekend, and making actual friends who also got a kick out of working insane hours to produce something concrete at the end of two weeks. I absolutely loved it.

Getting involved in university also had other perks. I found out that there were events that had free drinks, if you only knew the right people, and suddenly I had something of a social life. I worked in a shop, not a bar, so I had evenings free and could actually socialise the way other people did.

The downside of my shop job was, after Christmas (when they had employed a huge amount of extra staff to deal with the massive Christmas bonanza), they kept on far too many of us, which meant there weren’t enough hours to go around. I went from working twenty-five hours a week in term time to being rota-ed for about ten. It was not even enough to pay my rent.

But others who worked in the shop were sometimes flaky. Although my availability for hours was weekends and times when I did not have lectures or seminars, I would often get a call: ‘can you come in for six hours? Someone hasn’t shown up.’ And I would go in.

Third year was the year I started skipping lectures. I didn’t make a habit of it; except that I did, because they always called to offer me hours, and I always said yes. I didn’t want to miss classes, but I did.

When I turned up to the classes, I had done the basic reading but nothing more. I had stopped reading anything to accompany the texts. When I knew I would miss the lecture or the tutorial I didn’t read the text either. I was scraping 2.1s on my essays, which I would painstakingly draft and re-draft in the hum of the newspaper office in between churning out articles and re-writing other people’s. In the newspaper office, I learned the difference between a dash and a hyphen, and when to use a semi-colon. I learned how to check sources and get quotes and find stories. But I did not learn much about English Literature in my third year.

Before exams, the hours had dwindled ever more. Others were feeling the pinch; for some, this was their full time job, and they were working less than 20 hours a week. I resigned just before exams, hoping others could take my hours. I went for a newspaper-related scholarship. After all, I had given up evenings and weekends (in between shifts) to the newspaper. I thought I stood a good chance.

The end of third year brought both good and bad news. I did not win the newspaper scholarship. It turned out, being involved in university societies meant you made enemies as well as friends.

The good news was that I had a new job. I was working in a theatre, selling tickets. It was a different world. For one thing, I got to sit down all day for the first time in three years. For another, they were willing to give me ten-hour shifts six days a week during my university’s summer holiday (on the seventh day, I worked as a teaching assistant at a weekend programme for young people; soon, I was a drama and creative writing teacher there). And finally, when the phone wasn’t ringing or customers weren’t queuing, I could read. It was the perfect solution to my problems. No longer exhausted and run off my feet earning minimum wage, suddenly I could draw the wages of a king (€10.50 an hour!) for sitting and reading. I saw Riverdance five times, and loved it each time more than the last.

In the summer, I looked up my exam results online. 66%. I’d got a 2.1. In fact, I had dropped only one per cent from my first and second year results. The difference in not attending lectures and not spending 8 hours a day in the library was one per cent.

Next week, I will write about my final year of university.

You can read about my first year here, my second year here, my fourth year here and my fifth year here.