So it’s your final term, of your final year at York and everyone’s asking you what you’re going to do afterwards? Or, in the case of the York Award interview team I faced yesterday, “How do you feel your time at York has contributed to your personal development?” Not an easy question to answer at the best of times but when you’re already beginning to stress about looming deadlines and the realities of finding paid employment, it provokes other much more disturbing concerns. Such as “How have I changed? What skills have I learnt if any? What can I contribute to the workplace? Why would anyone employ me? Will I even manage to get a degree when I’ve still got three essays to complete and an exam to do?” Dealing with the irrational panic that the prospect of essays and exams provoke is still proving a real issue for me. Perhaps as members of the English department suggested during their lecture on the research and essay writing process, students need to consider their project as a voyage of discovery during which you tell the reader the story of how you reached these conclusions. Whilst such an analogy is inspiring, a more realistic comparison was drawn with these essays and a public performance during which bored members of the crowd may be tempted to throw rotten tomatoes or bellow ‘Get on with it'! Whatever imagery you use to describe it, the quest for the perfect essay is not one I’d chose to pursue if I could avoid it. Unfortunately there’s no knight on a white charger coming to rescue me from my attic prison and I, like my equally captive audience, am condemned to remain imprisoned in my attic turret until those evil assignments have been written. The problems remains therefore, how do I convince the examiner that they find my research about the seductive power of the ‘pinny’ in Mills and Boon and its parallels within Middle English Popular Romance as fascinating as I do? Maybe I need to return to the question asked by the York Award team. If so, then the answer to what I have learned from my time at York seems to be the confidence to take control of these dreaded assignments. If, as my work experience has shown me, I can persuade a group of twenty primary school children that pictures of dead people, who wore silly clothes and only had a bath once a year are interesting. Then I should be able to convince an examiner that I have produced an essay that’s worth reading! When narrating my ‘stories’ I may have more in common with crazed Bond Villains forcing the captured hero to listen to their inspired, but ultimately insane, schemes to take over the world than the medieval minstrels I aspire to and yet there’s something appealing about opening an essay with the challenge:- “So Mr. Examiner, you think to torture me with an endless succession of essays and exams? Well I’m armed and ready for this conflict! I shall defeat the dragon of distraction and crush the demons of despair. I can survive this battle to emerge battle scarred, but triumphant, as I claim the Holy Grail that is the degree certificate." I then intend to depart on a new quest: to find employment in the real world! Veronica | 
