Tale of Dante, the snake saving my skin

EXAM DIARY:DANTE THE snake shed his skin last night. Rebirth is painful, and you're not offered an epidural.

He made such a racket that my brother opted to sleep in the bathroom. He fell on the way and set off the burglar alarm. Woken so rudely, I couldn't go back to sleep so I looked over my art history notes.

The first thing I came across was a section on the symbol of the snake in the Book of Kells. The monks were fond of detailing the snake in the pangs of renewal - very symbolic, don't-you-know. In my sleepy state I didn't spot the providence.

It was my Dad, peering over my shoulder at the breakfast table, who saw the light.

"The snake losing its skin! The rebirth! Dante and the alarm! It all fits! The Book of Kells will come up on today's paper!" Perhaps if I breakfasted on muesli instead of Yorkie I might have had the wherewithal to spot it too. I set myself up next to Dante's enclosure, and while the labouring cornsnake evangelised in reptilian tongue I got down to some serious monk business.

I knew so much about the Books of Kells and Durrow that I filled 24 pages of script on yesterday's exam, more than I wrote for Irish which was an hour longer. It wasn't an exam, it was a postdoctoral thesis.

I'll get a PhD and a Leaving Cert in a job lot and I can skip straight to lecturing on mediaeval manuscripts to fund my medical training. Cross disciplinary research is all the buzz these days - I wonder if I could profitably merge monastic artwork and cardiology? Surely I'd get funding for that, with my precocious doctorate? That's providing the examiners don't punish me too harshly for those awful drawings in my roughwork. I recreated the Book of Durrow in stick figures.

So that's it. I predict that I now have 480 out of 500 and if I get an A1 in Classical Studies next week I'll be home and dry. I got 89 per cent in the mocks, and I only took the subject up last September, so it's looking good. I'll spend the next week watching Hollywood remakes of classical tales to get myself in the mood. When writing about ancient history it helps to have pictures in your head, especially when they're pictures of Brad Pitt and Colin Farrell.

And now I leave the pages of The Irish Times to get on with the business of finally completing secondary education. I've been doing the Leaving for three years now, and it's hard to believe that this is the end of the line.

I feel like poor old Dante, about to slip my skin and enter a new phase of life. I don't expect it will be too painful, but if it is, at least I'll be able to administer my own anaesthetics. If I don't get the 480 I need for medicine, I'll have my PhD to fall back on.

Laura Brady was a repeat Leaving Cert student at the Institute of Education, Dublin.

She will be writing about her experiences of college life in The Irish Times in the autumn.