u/callmebongos

Hi all!

I'm going to be leaving UWE soon, and I need to find a replacement tenant to fill the gap left in my housemates' hearts.

The house is around 25-30mins away from campus walking (I know, a bit of a trek) - it has good buses into the city, and it's a five bedroom. It totals around £204 a week including all bills, and there's a driveway for if you drive.

I don't really want to be liable for rent for a house that I'm not gonna be living in, so if you're interested in living with four other people (Each of them very nice and sensible) please let me know as soon as possible so I can get everything together!

Thank yoooouuuu!!

I’ve made the incredibly unwise decision — at the ripe old age of 21 — to go back and retake my A Levels.

For context, my GCSEs were in 2021, so they were affected by COVID and teacher-assessed grades. Because of that, I didn’t get the GCSE profile I probably could have got under normal exam conditions, which then limited the A Levels I was able to take. I ended up going down a route I wasn’t particularly happy with, but I still managed to get into university.

The problem is: I’m now close to graduating from a degree I genuinely despise, at a university I also really dislike. I’ve tried to make it work, but the whole thing feels like I got shoved onto the wrong timeline and then just kept walking because it was easier than stopping.

So now, like the Avengers, I’m trying to go back two years and fix the timeline.

My plan is to retake my A Levels properly, aim for significantly better grades, and then reapply for a course and university that actually fit what I want to do. I know this is risky. I know I’ll be older than most applicants. I know it might look strange on paper. But I also know that carrying on just because I’m already “on the path” feels worse.

I’m not trying to pretend I was perfect the first time round. I definitely could have worked harder. But I also had COVID disruption, limited options after GCSEs, and a lot of circumstances that made the route I ended up on feel more like damage control than an actual choice.

Has anyone here gone back and retaken A Levels as an adult/mature student? Did it actually help? How did universities view it? And is this a brave attempt to correct my academic trajectory, or am I simply doing educational time travel with delusions of grandeur?

Any advice, reality checks, or “I did this and survived” stories would be appreciated.