For the past eight years I’ve been a permanent lecturer in the National College of Art and Design. That’s my full-time job and I love it. But when I was seventeen I applied here and didn’t get in. I’m happy to share this fact with colleagues or students if it comes up, but it almost never does. Because my focus was on making a portfolio, how many points I got in my Leaving Cert wasn’t the ordeal for me that it is for many Irish students. Still, I know how it feels to open a letter with what feels like your whole future inside, and for it to hold bad news.

I’d wanted to go to NCAD ever since I learned, aged thirteen, that there was such a thing as art college (somewhere you could go and draw all day!). My mother pointed it out to me as we drove into Dublin via Thomas Street, the thick lettering on the redbrick facade. I pictured women with long hair dreamily sketching Grecian urns. When I visited for a summer course two years later it was so much better, sprawling outside sketching with my new friends until the attendants yelled at us to get out, wandering through the library humming with the wellbeing of a room full of beautifully illustrated books. I’d never felt so much like I already belonged somewhere while wanting desperately to belong there at the same time.

I worked on my portfolio in the summers and the evenings of my Leaving Cert year while my classmates were studying........

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