I posted this on LinkedIn a year ago, but with #ALevel results due and people discovering that they need to go through #Clearing, there may be more folks here who need to read it:

There have been lots of articles in the news over the last few days about people missing their expected (or hoped-for) A-level grades, so I thought I'd share my experiences. My A levels were now more than half of my lifetime ago, so I am in a position to think about them with a bit more perspective than I was at the time.

When I was 17, I applied to four universities: Cambridge, Manchester, Warwick, and Southampton. My interview at Cambridge did not go well at all. They started by asking me an easy question but I knew that Cambridge interview questions were hard and so I assumed there was a trick. I didn't want to give the obvious answer because that would show that I hadn't seen the trick. After 5-10 minutes of evasion they told me the answer and moved on. Sure enough, the answer was the one I'd seen immediately. The question was intended to relax me by giving me something easy to start with but had done the opposite. The interview went downhill from there and I did not get an offer.

The other universities that I applied to did not do interviews. The open day at Manchester did a spectacularly bad job of conveying the excellence that I am now aware the department exemplifies, so I put Warwick as my first choice and Southampton as my second.

I remember going into school and opening my results in something of a state of shock. The offer from Southampton had been low, so I'd assumed that it was a safe backup. In spite of that, my grades were not good enough. When I called them, they did have some spaces free but needed my first choice to release me before they could make an offer. Warwick took most of a day to officially reject me, by which time Southampton had filled up the course. They could put me on a different course but not one I was interested in.

I then had some frantic time looking at the league tables for universities with clearing places left. Swansea was top of the list and I was fortunate that my parents were willing and able to drive me to an open day for clearing applicants. I was offered a place and, two weeks before the start of term, also a place in student accommodation.

In hindsight, going to Swansea was a great outcome for me (and not just because it is the university campus closest to the beach of all UK universities). One of the most important things that I discovered about a university education was that it isn't there to teach you things: You can do that yourself and will need to throughout your career. It's there to give you a guided tour of your ignorance.

I'd looked at courses with a lot of practical content because I knew that I didn't know the things that they were teaching me. The Swansea degree course was very mathematical. They acknowledged that, yes, there were physical machines that could approximate universal models of computation, but using them was a bit dirty. Proper computer science was done with mathematical formalisms, not with anything as mundane as a computer. The things I learned about on the degree course were things I didn't even know existed when I applied, yet have used repeatedly throughout my career.

At the same time, the course was not as challenging as somewhere like Imperial or Cambridge would have been. This meant that I had lots of time both for extracurricular activities (I ended up running a few student societies) and for learning about the things that I knew I didn't know. The university computer society (unfortunately named SUCS) had a number of members who were early contributors to Linux, for example, and gave a lot more useful mentorship in practical system development than is available at most universities.

For anyone suffering from poor A Level results, I have a few pieces of advice. Lots of people have probably told you that no one will care about your A Level results in a few years but that doesn't help you now. If you manage to get a clearing place, remember that this is just giving you a different set of opportunities. Someone at a second tier university who takes all of the opportunities that are provided to them will get a lot more out of it than a top-tier university who coasts along.

Getting a First from Swansea enabled me to do a PhD. Having a lot of free time enabled me to contribute to the growing F/OSS ecosystem and get a lot of practical experience. The latter of these gave me a number of consulting opportunities (from people that didn't care that I had a degree, let alone a PhD). This broad experience and the PhD allowed me to return to academia at Cambridge, where I remain a Visiting Researcher. Each new role has built on things that I've done before but not always in ways that I expected.

When I was a PhD student, someone drew my attention to a study of people who described themselves as 'lucky'. The common thread that they found was that these people were willing to identify and take opportunities that they were presented. I think this needs to be caveated with the fact that being able to fail at something and it not completely destroy your life is one of the key indicators of privilege but if you are able to move on from your A-Level results and find a place somewhere else, keep yourself open to opportunities.

With the benefit of hindsight and emotional distance, I think I can honestly say that my life has been far more interesting and my impact on the world much greater than if I'd been able to follow the plan that I had aged 17.