This essay title comes from a book I bought several years ago called “642 Things to Write About” and is hopefully the first of many prompts I will use to write.

88%.

I can still see it clearly to this day. It has been almost sixteen years since my Leaving Certificate, but I can still see the 88%. It does not haunt me. I do not obsess over it or dwell on how things might have been different. But I remember that result.

There is no real yearning attached to it now. And in truth, it would not have changed everything on its own. But perhaps it represents something larger — a moment that might have altered the direction of my life.

At the time, I told myself it would not have made a real difference. The extra 2% would only have translated into ten more points. On paper, I was still some distance from my first-choice university course — Law International — and so I tried not to dwell on it.

But later I learned that a friend of mine had secured a place on Law International with just fifteen more points than I had achieved. And suddenly the arithmetic began to feel less abstract because it was not only the 2% in History.

Another subject I had taken was Classical Studies. Over the two years leading up to the exam, I regularly received As and Bs in exams and homework assignments. Yet in the final examination — the only assessment that truly counted — I came away with a C. By the time the Classics exam came around, perhaps I had taken my eye off the ball and not given it the focus it deserved – there is no maybe there, it is definitely the case. Perhaps I had simply grown weary of the relentlessness of exam season. That exam was on the same day as my Economics exam, and I did not balance my focus well enough in the lead-up to the day. Whatever the cause, it was another small margin left on the table.

Individually, none of these gaps seemed decisive. Two percent here. A grade boundary there. But together they suggest something more significant — the quiet power of accumulation. A handful of slightly different outcomes, entirely within reach, might have shifted everything.

When I look back, it feels like a hinge moment. Not dramatic. Not tragic. Just narrow.

I was not that far away.

What I was not far away from is now almost impossible to measure.

At the time, I believed I wanted Law International — a law degree with an Erasmus year built into it. On the surface, it was not radically different from what I ended up studying: Law and German, but it lacked the language element. It was all law through English, but with the year abroad and with more choice as to where you could go. As I write this in Germany — with half-Irish, half-German children, entering my seventh year working at a German law firm, able to live and work comfortably in German — the difference feels vast.

It is impossible now to imagine how things might have unfolded otherwise.

Part of the appeal of Law International, if I am honest, was its perceived prestige in my head. It required the highest Leaving Cert points of the law courses, so it felt like the elite of the law classes. At eighteen, that mattered to me. At thirty-four, I could not care less about impressing anyone. Perhaps getting into that course would have altered how I carried myself. Perhaps not.

German, at school, was never one of my strongest subjects. I was solid, but rarely outstanding. Before Erasmus, I was often among the weaker students in my group. It kept my ego in check. It forced me to work. I had to invest time and effort just to stay afloat, and that steady pressure shaped me more than I realised at the time.

Had I studied Law International instead — with my focus directed elsewhere — what would have happened to my German? Honestly, it would have dropped out of my life, and I would never have learned it. It may also have affected my view of Gaeilge – as although I received high marks in the Leaving Cert itself (and in the Junior Cert), in in-class exams I was around the C-grade – so the reverse Classical Studies experience… Seeing regular red pen corrections on all my essays for years meant that I did not have the most positive view of it when I was leaving school. Now, because I regularly work in a different language, it has made me more motivated to use my Gaeilge more – to the extent I have my own podcast series, “Gaeilge Thar Lear”. I cannot see that happening without studying German, strangely enough… Those are small examples. Simply put, the version of me who stood at that crossroads exists now only at a distance.

And yet, the true hinge was not prestige, nor points, nor even pride.

It was Erasmus.

My Erasmus year was spent in what, for me, was the perfect place: Marburg, a small university town not far from Frankfurt. It was exactly the right size. Not so large that I would disappear into it, and not so small that it felt limited. It was intimate without being insular. I was never anonymous there, yet bigger cities — Frankfurt, Kassel — were close enough to make the world feel open. With the Semesterticket and the Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket, the whole country felt accessible. Travel was easy. And cheap.

But it was not just geography.

The people I met there were exceptional. We had adventures that, at the time, felt ordinary in their frequency but, in retrospect, feel formative. Marburg was what I needed at that stage of my life, and I was aware of it as it was happening. It absolutely felt like this was the start of the next phase of my life.

When the year ended, I felt its absence physically. Not everyone experienced Erasmus that way. Many from my university went abroad that year — across Europe — and returned able to slip back into their pre-Erasmus lives with relative ease. I could not. I felt a pull back to Germany that I struggled to explain. A few years later, I returned. There, I met my partner. Later still, I moved to Germany permanently — the country in which I now write this.

Looking back, that year was not simply enjoyable. It was directional.

Of course, not every Erasmus story unfolds the same way. Germany, in hindsight, was perhaps an ideal setting for me. Student life was affordable, which is not always the case, and it was easy to travel and embark on adventures. I remember a friend describing his year in Oslo — how the cost of living quietly restricted his world, limiting travel, limiting spontaneity. Others found themselves surrounded by large groups from home — fellow UCC students, clusters of Irish voices — and never fully stepped outside that familiarity.

I did not have that experience.

Marburg required something of me. And I gave myself to it.

It is crazy to think that a few percentage points here and there would have prevented that from happening. It is even crazier that, in my first semester, I was considering dropping German and just going into Law without the German component. I wasn’t really enjoying it and was struggling. At that time, I did not really know how to study languages and did not think I could learn German… I thought it was holding me back from my main subjects – the legal subjects. Later in life, I would learn that knowledge is nice to have, but skills such as languages are vital.

If I had received my first choice in the Leaving Cert, I would not have landed in Marburg for Erasmus – who knows where I would have been. The choices were nice on paper – Prague, Oslo, Leiden, and some universities in the United States – but maybe they would not have been what I was looking for at that time in life. It is honestly difficult to imagine somewhere better for me at that time in life.

Returning to the 88% and the Leaving Cert, it is an easy hinge moment to identify, as the numbers are so black and white and easy to quantify. 90% would have resulted in more points, increasing the chance of getting a different course… that is far easier to identify than other, more abstract character moments. There may have been other moments in secondary school that put me on the path I am on in life, but an exam result or two is an easy one to grab onto and remember.

I created a podcast episode about this exact story for my series “Gaeilge Thar Lear” and you can listen to it here: