Zoë Wundenberg | Year 12 students shouldn't hang their hopes on one number when HSC results come out

When I was in year 12, I remember the pressure. I remember feeling like my whole world depended on the number that would appear on the screen on that fateful day. To make matters worse, the raw scores for the exams were released the day before, giving us 24 hours of total panic and anxiety over what that meant for our final mark. It was torture. Pure torture.

Add to that, the internet speed of 1999 and the state of government websites back then, and it was a recipe for a mental health disaster.

I remember literally spending hours trying to get online with the little dial up progress bar dotting across the screen and the grating screech of the modem assaulting my already frazzled nerves, only for a parent to forget momentarily and pick up the phone to make a phone call and disrupt the whole process.

It took hours and hours - no exaggeration - just trying to get online (along with every other year 12 student in the state), only to finally get to the department website and find it had crashed because the servers had overloaded with students trying to access their results - a problem apparently no one anticipated.

In the end, it nearly took all day to get my results.

When I finally got them, I was one of the lucky ones. And my relief was palpable. My subject scores released the previous day had me concerned as my French mark wasn't what I had expected, and I was fielding phone calls from the school and classmates to ask what my mark was because theirs were lower still. I spent that 24-hour period stressing about not being able to get into any of my course preferences and being stuck with no idea what I was going to do with my life.

As I'm sure all of you know by now (after five and a half years as an oversharing column writer), I'm a chronic overthinker and often tie myself in knots over details, so imagine how I was handling all of this.

I'll give you a hint: not terribly brilliantly.

While I was lucky enough that my mark brought relief rather than further panic, this isn't the case for many students out there. Things happen - often beyond our control - that impact our ability to do the best we can. We experience breakups, family crises, deaths in the family, illness ... any number of unexpected events can impact how we handle the final two years of school.

Maybe we just can't find our mojo, or the stress of exams leads to us experiencing brain fog or disengagement. Maybe we have a bad day on exam day. Maybe you got into the exam and suddenly panicked and forgot everything.

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For whatever reason, if next week doesn't give you the mark you were hoping for, all is not lost.

Let me say that again.

All. Is. Not. Lost.

Let's be honest, what we learn in school is a great precursor to being a parent who needs to help their future kids with their homework (unless the schools go and change how they teach say ... maths ... and then what you know is pretty useless ... I'm looking at you, Mrs Clarke), but it's lacking in life preparation. School outcomes simply don't predict life success.

School teaches you to comply, to deliver on expectations, not to change the world. You have to ask yourself, what do you want out of life?

And guess what? At 18, you have no damned idea. In fact, at 40, you might still have no idea. You don't have to have your life mapped out when you leave school. You don't need to have your ducks in a row. Having ducks at all at this stage is a bonus.

So don't hang all your hopes on the number next week. Your work up to this point is not accurately summed up with that single number: you are more than a sum of your parts. No matter what happens, your worth as a human is so much more than that.

And once you're in your 20s, no one cares what you got in year 12 anyway. For reals.