"No regrets." With Leaving Cert results and CAO offers to the forefront of students’ minds at the moment, we caught up with Her.ie reader Joanna in the second part of our #InHerShoes series to talk about that fateful day, and how she decided to skip going to college at the age of 17. _______________________________________________ I remember the day I got my Leaving Cert results all too well. I hadn’t really cared much for school, but presumed it would all work out well in the end. It didn’t. I did terribly. I remember staring at my results in absolute shock and disbelief. I suppose I thought that I was untouchable. But reality kicked in really quickly. It almost felt like an out of body experience – not to sound too dramatic. I felt like I could see myself standing there outside the school with the world as I knew it crashing down around me. Okay,  I may have a bit of an over-active imagination, but that’s truly what it felt like. I stumbled from the school grounds not really sure what to do. I knew my mother and my little sister were waiting in the car for me to come back and I just couldn’t bear the look on their faces. You know that look… not angry, but disappointed. I’d like to say that right then and there I vowed to get my life sorted and figure out what I wanted, but I suppose, I actually went completely in the opposite direction. I told everyone who knew me how little I cared about my results, and nearly tried to make it cool that I hadn’t done as well as I’d hoped. That lasted for about four weeks. Until they all headed off and went to college. Still immersed in my disdain for the education system, I got myself a job in my local shop and after nearly getting fired twice for coming into work severely hungover, along with some stern words from my mother, I finally started to pull myself together. I started to do well at work, and was promoted to manager just 18 months later. As the chain of shops got bigger and expanded, I got promoted to Area Manager and soon, I was over an entire province. My mother was proud of me, my sisters looked up to me and I finally felt comfortable in my own shoes. By the age of 26 though, I still felt like I had missed out on something. I had a talk with my bosses at work and they agreed that I could go to college. The following year – almost exactly 10 years after I missed out on college the first time round – I enrolled in university. It was hard walking through those gates with 16, 17 and 18-year-olds, but I didn't let it get to me and in fact, made a brilliant group of friends over the years. I kept my job going part-time, juggled course work and classes and managed, three years later, to emerge with a degree in Business. Looking back, I don’t think I was ready for college when I was 17. I was never inclined to study and was very immature for my age. To go from the local corner shop to the manager of a massive area was a huge achievement for me and to finish all of that off with a degree at the end of it was probably my finest hour. I got to wear my graduation hat and my mother got her pictures, finally. I smiled that day so hard it almost hurt. And when I got home that night, the smile turned into tears – tears of happiness – as I placed that precious degree on my chest of drawers. Mission accomplished. It might have taken 10 years to get there, but the journey was worth every single step."