National Finish Your Degree Day

 National Finish Your Degree Day.

This is normally the day when school children across Britain jump out of bed, wait excitedly at the front door for the post to arrive and then discover all of those very extreme and contrasting emotions. They will just bite their fingernails, hoping against hope that all of those industrious and dedicated weeks, months and years will bear fruition. Put simply, they just want to know how they've done in their GSCEs and, in a week or so, their A Levels. 

It's one of those crucial, life changing and defining moments in their young life when kids get all hot and bothered in case their exams have gone disastrously wrong. It may not be the end of the world if things have gone belly up for them because they can always re-take the aforementioned exams but, if they have failed quite emphatically, then the gnawing doubts and mental anxieties will inevitably set in. They've been a terrible disappointment to mum and dad and how on earth are they going to rectify what would appear to be insoluble problems. 

But today is what happens if you were fortunate enough to pass these exams and go to university because you may want to know how you've done with your degree. University studies were sadly beyond your academic aptitude for learning about subjects you could never quite grasp. So you became resigned to your fate and you knuckled down life at a secondary school unaware that some of your classmates may have been clever enough to study what seemed demanding subjects as physics, chemistry, biology, maths, economics and art. 

And yet today is National Finish Your Degree Day and even that sentence somehow seems so far removed from everything you had experienced at school that even the mere mention of this day seems like wishful thinking on your part. The truth is that one exam and one exam only determined your educational journey and shaped your future career plans or lack of any in my case. If you passed your 11 plus and went to a high or grammar school, you were considered brainy, erudite, quick on the uptake, bright and capable of becoming a working or middle class individual, climbing the ladder of management and one day becoming a company director. 

So here you are this morning, privately optimistic about your degree swotting, all of those diligent mornings, afternoons and evenings locked away in your Halls of Learning and whole heartedly memorising the finer points of your degree and leafing through thousands of reference books, thick and weighty tomes with mind blowing information about bloodthirsty wars, battles, dates, places, detailed descriptions about chemical terminology, complicated logarithms and cosine maths tables. 

Controversially, todays university students will be required to pay monumental sums of hard cash for their further education. And in recent times, we've all heard about the outraged reactions of students who have to cough up thousands of pounds on a degree course for any of the subjects just mentioned. Subsequently, all of today's young teenagers may be burdened with a hellish debt they may never be able to pay off. So they take out these troublesome loans with no prospect of meeting these daunting financial requirements.  

But you do have unwavering admiration for those who have forsaken everything just to get to this point. It's hard to know how much importance society still attaches to school qualifications since the great economists, bankers, scientists, doctors, commercial artists, laboratory technicians, engineers and politicians would still attribute their successes in life to a good university education. The professional classes who go to such eminent public schools such as Eton and Harrow may well be born with a silver spoon in their mouths but a privileged background doesn't necessarily mean that a streetwise intelligence is guaranteed. 

The arguments rage over huge tuition fees and then there are the extraordinary financial demands placed upon youngsters which continue to be a major source of discussion in the polished lobbies and corridors of Westminster. And once again the class system in England, always the oldest bone of contention among social commentators, rears its ugly head. How is it the super wealthy invariably prosper and inevitably end up in strikingly impressive four pillared homes with several Rolls Royce cars in their crunching gravelled driveways? Perhaps these are the gated communities who sneer disdainfully on the rest of Britain. But maybe this is completely wrong and this is some distorted perspective of the way we live today.

And yet today is National Finish Your Degree Day. It's time to assess your molecular biology degree and wonder exactly what it is you want to do with it. You could become a well respected hospital surgeon, a leading medical commentator who knows all about their field of expertise or maybe you could be the next distinguished professor familiar with all the latest experiments and potential cures for all diseases. This is your day for sober reflection and breathing a sigh of relief. After all, you've worked yourself into the ground and deserve your moment in the sun. Well done and congratulations.