Ready for the last exam - and ready to start living

COLLEGE DIARY:OH, I DO love this country. I just spent three hours in a chemistry exam, gazing out the window at the summer I've hardly seen since moving to Ireland. I couldn't wait to charge my last particle and race out into the UV rays for some dangerous and unproductive lazing. As I handed in my borderline chemistry paper and skipped out the door, I felt the first drop of rain for a week.

So I write this sitting on a bench on the NUI Galway campus, stubbornly ignoring the raindrops. This is my last column for The Irish Timesin a year that was as mixed as an Irish summer day. I have complained bitterly about having to take the basic sciences of first-year medicine again, but my year of essentially repeating the Leaving Cert has given me a bit of space to develop some corners of myself that the real Leaving Cert didn't allow for.

There were the hours with Maurice, my fun and friendly Galway driving instructor, who not only listened to my woes and braved my battered car, but got me through the driving test first time around. There was at least one Irish Times reader who didn't appreciate the fact that a 17-year-old Polish girl managed to get a car under her using only the Children's Allowance, but I remain proud of my achievement and grateful to the Department of Social and Family Affairs. And to Maurice.

There was (and still is) my blessed job in a Galway Veterinary Clinic where I met some of the nicest people in the world. I also met some of the nicest animals in the world, up to and including the dog I helped to do a postmortem on last Friday. To help at an event like that was a wonderful experience for a medical student. My friends were rather surprised to hear that postmortems are carried out on animals, but it happens all the time. Once I even did a postmortem on a hamster.

There were the hours alone in my microscopic flat, reading Anne Frank and second World War histories when I should have been studying. And there has been the unexpected diversion into journalism, which I intend to pursue. For the last three months,

I have been doing a secret correspondence course in media writing, sending articles into the ether on a whole range of subjects from freedom of speech to in-vitro fertilisation. My tutor has informed me that I need to moderate my opinions a bit if I'm going to make it in journalism. Anyone who has been following this column will appreciate what a challenge that is going to be.

Undaunted, I have applied for a writing job in the Polish edition of Newsweek. They're looking for student writers from around the world to write from their new homes. I think I could give good account of Ireland. I've lived in Dublin, Drogheda and Galway, studied in two schools and one college, worked a couple of jobs, volunteered, received social welfare and paid tax here. For a 17-year-old, that's not a bad level of integration into Irish society.

From next Thursday, when the exams are over, I'll be taking on the country in style. With no lectures or exams to hold me back, my little car and I will take a road trip. I'm heading for Drogheda, to visit my old Leaving Cert friends. I will spend a week there, shopping and partying to a degree that the Leaving Cert never allowed. Then I'm going to Cork to spend some time with another old friend from school. I've put down little roots all over this land! Then, after a quick detour to Poland for some 18th-birthday revelry, I'll return to Galway for a summer sharing a big old country house with a dozen Polish visitors.

Life is about to change for me. After three years of staying under the radar, with my head in a book, I'm going to start living a little in Ireland. Soon I'll reach "adulthood" in this country, but in fact I've been acting like an adult for too long. Now that I'm turning 18 and my medical degree is underway, maybe I should spend a bit of time acting like a teenager. The last three years have been very tough: a new language, a new home, a new education system. I got the high points and the course I wanted, but I haven't always felt happy and free. I have had yearnings to go home, reservations about moving to a big city such as Galway and frustrations about college. I've made some big decisions very early in my life and then had to deal with them alone.

Now, as the clouds clear over the NUI Galway campus and my last exam of the year is in sight, I get the feeling that I'm about to start living.

It's been great to share all my joys and sorrows with the readers of The Irish Times, so if you ever come across Miroslawa Gorecka taking your pulse in AE, you'll know that that borderline chemistry exam I just handed in was on the right side of the border.

Miraslowa Gorecka is a medicine student at NUI Galway. She also wrote the 2007 Leaving Cert diary inThe Irish Times .