Toxic

Hello all! Long time no see.

And as this blog will unfold, you’ll soon learn why.

The choice for this week’s missive is a classic from Britney Spears was overplayed to the nth degree on every radio station and nightclub in the UK and then overplayed in France the following summer when I was there too. Who could ever forget Britney? She’s certainly something.

So, the exams! To follow on from my last post, my medical law exam fared well (I believe), and Family Law and Land Law followed suit. I was feeling very confident and happy and at peace with the amount of work I had done. Revision is pretty rubbish, no matter how interested you are in the topic, but it’s something you have to do to achieve in exams.

BUT THEN

Unfortunately, I fell ill. Here I will take a brief sidebar to talk about what happens when you spend too much time with international students – your accent and word choices generally tend to blur a lot. Being someone that spends a lot of time with Canadian students (which you can see from my previous blog!), I keep dropping little Canadian idioms into the way I speak – for example, in this blog, I had to delete a few sentences ago, as instead of “I fell ill”, I wrote “I got sick”. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! This is not how I, Harriet, born and raised in Devonshire, speak! I feel sorry for all students studying Erasmus now (although, still slightly jealous!) as I genuinely believe if I were, say, studying in France, I would return with a heavy French accent smoking 60 Galoise a day… Sigh.

Anyway, back to what I was…. typing. I fell ill, unfortunately. It appears I picked up some kind of bizarre tropical illness. I kid you not, I was in the Tropical Illnesses ward of the Leicester Royal Infirmary. I have not been abroad recently, and neither have my peers, and yet I still managed to pick up some obscure stomach bug that started to snack on my intestines.

Don’t worry dear readers, I won’t go into the details (believe me, I don’t want to), but let’s just say I became very very very ill, and my last thought on the planet was my EU exam. So this is the focus of this post, WHAT TO DO AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER WHEN YOU GET ILL DURING EXAMS.

Fortunately, the University is a very welfare-based one and understand that not all students are super heroes, and there are definite policies for when a student falls unwell or has mitigating circumstances (for example a family bereavement, emotional problems – not just physical, concrete things) around the time of exams.

The most important thing is to let your department know as soon as possible – they cannot help you if they do not know what’s going on, and if you turn up to an exam, it is generally assumed that you are well enough to sit it, even if your lower half is being eaten by a crocodile during the exam, say.

The Law faculty at the University of Leicester (and I’m sure all the other ones too!) has a really great welfare mindset, and if you tell all the right people and provide the documentation (eg. doctors notes) to show that what you are saying is indeed true, your circumstances should be taken into account and you may be entitled to sit the exam (NB: this is not a resit, it is simply another chance to take the exam, so your mark is not capped or barred in any manner) at a later date.

I really am grateful to the Law School and their fantastic team for all their help they gave me – in particular the lovely Beth, who was my first port of call, who was absolutely amazing and helped me to get things organised communicating with the Law school (readers from the Facebook page will know and love her very well!). I will be sitting my EU exam in September instead, which is a weight off of my mind, and also makes available another opportunity to blog in September!!

But for now, I am going to hide under a duvet and watch Ally McBeal. Because even 90s rom-com Law counts as being productive when you’re ill….

Get well soon, me.