Deciding my future
In Ireland, we make applications to colleges using a CAO form. Generally you’re accepted or rejected based on your Leaving Cert results, which go from 0-600 points. Most students do 7 subjects and are marked on their best six, with the points being 0-100 for each subject. Few few students in the country get 600 points, and getting anything over 500 is considered a huge acheivement, and this is often rewarded by colleged by a €1,000 reward for anyone who gets over 500 points and goes on to attend their college.
Today at 17:15 is the deadline for getting the discounted price on your CAO submission. I submitted mine last night, and I must say it’s a pretty odd experience. It’s like your filling out your future on the screen. We have periods later in the year during which we can change our choices, but it’s still good to try get your choices as accurate as you can. My first choice is a well known “BESS” (Business, Economics and Social Studies) course in Trinty College Dublin. Points for this last year were around 480, but not everyone who got these points actually got it. So, it’s a tough course to get into. Also, Trinity is Ireland’s most famous college, and the one with the most international recognition, so this means most of the students going there got over 500 points in their Leaving Cert, so there is no €1,000 reward.
I actually posted a while back about when I went to the open day in Trinity. That post received a recommendation for BESS from Dave Davis of Red Fly Marketing, which I was pretty happy about. Look at their RSS subscriber count to see why 
Do I think I can get into BESS? If I can seriously get my head down then yeah I do think I’m capable of it, but I really will have to work, which could be difficult for me, being lazy, and combined with the fact that I’ve never had to really work that hard to succeed in school.
Below are the list of my CAO choices, I picked 9 courses, you’re allowed choose ten. My courses are chosen from just three colleges, as any other ones and I’d be getting 4 buses a day, and I know I wouldn’t want that. The three colleges are Trinity, NUI Maynooth, and DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology).
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All business related. I’d thought for a long time that Maynooth would be my first choice, but their business courses aren’t well recognised, so they feature in the fourth spot on my choices, behind both TCD and DIT.
If you haven’t filled out your CAO, you’ve got just over two hours to do so before the price goes up by €10, so go do it now and then change it at a later stage if you’ve got to! It’s also interesting to note that last year the CAO system crashed on the last day, because of so many people leaving it until the last minute.
Anyway, apologies to any Americans or whatnot who don’t know or care about all the crap in this post, but it’s a fairly big thing to fill out your CAO form, so I decided it was blog worthy.
Any folk reading this who’ve also done their CAO recently, do let me know what you’ve chosen, as I’m always curious to see what other people are picking. Just click to comment below 
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January 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Nice choices.
Here are mine.
1. DN030 Computer Science - Science
2. TR081 Business, Economic and Social Studies
3. DT228 Computer Science
4. DT211 Computing
5. DC121 Computer Applications
6. MH203 Computer Science and Software Engineering
7. DN015 Commerce
8. TA322 Science - Computing
9. BN104 Computing (Information Technology)
10. BN106 Engineering (Computer Engineering)
I feel like I comment too often compared to others, makes me look kinda gay