Hello Everyone!

First of all, let me say that I am very thankful to Bellerbys College for giving me the opportunity to share the experience of my first year at university with you on this blog.

My name is Zuzana Chlupackova, I'm 18 and I come from a relatively small country in Central Europe, the Czech Republic. I was postponing my first blog post until now, because until the A Level results day I was not sure which university I would go to. But now I can finally say that from October I will be reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University, and I am very excited about this!

As this is my first post ever, I was thinking to introduce myself and, most importantly, talk about the time I have spent in the UK so far, so if you feel this could be of any interest to you, read on :-).  

I was born in Vyskov, which is a small city in the Czech Republic and I lived in a tiny village called Olsany for the first year of my life (people are often surprised by this, since they say I am such a city type :-)). My family moved to Prague soon after and that's where I lived for the most part of my life.

The Czech educational system is different to the English one, so you might find it rather confusing that after the 5th grade at school I went to a selective gymnasium (an equivalent of grammar school), where I spent further five years before leaving to study in Bellerbys College Brighton in September 2009.

Before I first came to the UK, I was worried about pretty much everything - will I be able to cope with studies in English? will I make friends in an environment where I won't know anyone at first? How am I going to survive without my parents being far away? Well, if you are anything like I was, worry no more.

I'm not going to lie to you, I was homesick at the beginning, but within a few weeks I settled in very well. I didn't have to worry about not understanding English because the teachers spoke very clearly and were always willing to help. I made friends very quickly with people all over the world. And since I had internet in my lovely host family, I could contact my family on a daily basis, so sometimes, I didn't even have time to start feeling homesick. And besides, any worries I had, I could always either come to any of the teachers, or the lovely Mrs Chris Arulraj who was always there for us (thank you Mrs Chris!).

Although it really was my dream to get into Oxford University, I felt it was pretty much impossible at first (well I still feel it's a little impossible, since it still didn't quite sink in). But Bellerbys has showed me that with determination, hard work, and support from all the friendly teachers, everything was possible.

Here I must thank Mr Corcut for holding the Oxbridge meetings throughout the first four terms of my course, because they really were very useful in terms of preparation for the dreaded interviews. Thanks to these meetings the interviews went much better for me than I would have thought (If you'd like to know more about the interviews procedure, just let me know below in the comments, I could make a post about these). They were not easy, but they were not as daunting as I thought initially.

It did take a lot of hard work throughout the two years that I spent at Bellerbys. But do not be mistaken! I also had huge amounts of fun meeting various people, hanging out with friends (even studying with friends in our favourite Costa Coffee was fun!), singing in the college singing society, helping to manage various fun events for the college (the Carnival, the May Ball, etc.) in the Student Council, and so on.

Life of a student at Bellerbys is not just about studying (although this is massively important, of course) it is a lot more, and in all honesty, I think that all my friends at Bellerbys have enjoyed their courses just as much as I have (that is to say a LOT!).

So yes, this was a very brief summary of my life at Bellerbys Brighton. In the next post I will talk about my holidays (which are rather long - more than 3 months in total!) and about the preparation for university that I am faced with these days. If there is anything specific you would be interested in, I am more than happy to talk about it, so, please, let me know.

Thanks a lot for reading my first blog post!

I will be back soon!

Zuzana

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics).

Comments

[Peter Corcut]

Well done, Zuzana.
I enjoyed reading your first blog and look forward to hearing about your life at Oxford.
Best wishes,
Peter Corcut

[Agnes Vinkler]

Congratulations on your results and gaining a place at Oxford, Zuzana! I'll look forward to reading your upcoming notes here! :)

[David Few]

Thanks for writing such an interesting blog. I spend a lot of my life talking to future parents and students about how successful you can be at Bellerbys and how enjoyable it is. Now I can direct them straight to your blog! I would certainly be interested to hear how Bellerbys prepared you for Oxbridge interviews and how you did. All the very best in the future and we will be with you all the way. David Few. Student Recruitment Director, Bellerbys

[Matthew Ansell]

Congratulations Zuzana. What advice would you give fellow students aiming for a place at a top UK University? And how did you motivate yourself when you were tired or starting to question whether you would achieve your dream of an Oxford place?
Best wishes
Matthew

[Chris Arulraj]

Zuzanna - it is lovely to come back from my break and see that you have managed to achieve your dream. well done, look forward to seeing you and hearing how you do in the future. Mrs Chris

[Zuzana Chlupackova]

Thanks a lot for the lovely and encouraging comments!

Matthew, the advice that I would give to anyone wanting to go to the top UK universities would be to work hard no matter what everyone tells you, and try your best until the very end.
Usually when I got tired or demotivated, I would phone up my friends, and since Bellerbys has a community of students who are determined to achieve very high, friends were often helping me to get my motivation back. They would either encourage me by talking to me, or, in busy times (like the exam month) we would go to study together - usually when you see other people studying, it makes you study as well, especially as we can help each other with questions we can't handle, or explain difficult topics :-)

[Kana Maniwa]

Congratulations Zuzana! Thank you so much for helping me with study, choir, and for being my best friend. And yes, Costa was an amazing place for us to study together:p I am looking forward to your next blog post here!

[Agnes Vinkler]

Kana, you've done amazingly well too, so the congratulations are to you as well! I'll go to Costa for both of you and let the coffee shop know that you miss spending time there :-)