{"id":28041,"date":"2026-07-15T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T09:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/?p=28041"},"modified":"2026-06-08T13:27:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:27:05","slug":"my-clearing-story-aaliyah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/2026\/07\/15\/my-clearing-story-aaliyah\/","title":{"rendered":"My clearing story – Aaliyah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest blog by Aaliyah Watson, BSc (Hons) Marketing<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I first got my results and realised I\u2019d missed the grades for my first choice university by one grade, I honestly had no idea what to do.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It felt like everything I had planned for months had suddenly disappeared overnight. Everyone around me seemed to know exactly where they were going, while I was stuck refreshing Clearing pages and panicking about my future.<\/p>\n

The weird thing is, I had never really thought about Clearing before.<\/strong> In my head, it felt like a \u201cbackup option\u201d that nobody actually wanted to go through. I remember feeling disappointed, stressed, and honestly embarrassed at first because I kept thinking about how close I was. Missing my offer by one grade felt frustrating because I knew how hard I had worked.<\/p>\n

I did have a second choice university, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised I didn\u2019t actually want to go there just because it was the safe option. If I was going to spend the next few years somewhere, I wanted it to genuinely feel right for me. That\u2019s when I started properly looking through Clearing, even though I had no clue what I was doing.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, that\u2019s how I found Bournemouth University and, I couldn\u2019t be happier that I did.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Aaliyah<\/a>The whole process ended up being way less scary than I expected.<\/strong> Everyone I spoke to was really helpful and reassuring, which made such a difference because I was so overwhelmed at the time. Once I looked more into the course and the university itself, something just clicked. It suddenly felt exciting again instead of stressful.<\/p>\n

Looking back now, I genuinely think missing my first choice was one of those situations that feels awful at the time but actually works out for the best.<\/strong> If I had got the grades, I probably never would have even considered Bournemouth, and I would have missed out on an experience that\u2019s been so right for me.<\/p>\n

I think Clearing gets a bad reputation because people see it as \u201csettling,\u201d but for me it ended up opening a door I didn\u2019t even know existed.<\/strong> It taught me that not everything has to go exactly to plan for things to work out. Sometimes the unexpected route ends up being the better one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest blog by Aaliyah Watson, BSc (Hons) Marketing When I first got my results and realised I\u2019d missed the grades for my first choice university by one grade, I honestly had no idea what to do. It felt like everything I had planned for months had suddenly disappeared overnight. Everyone around me seemed to know… Read more » about My clearing story – Aaliyah<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3668,"featured_media":28058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,411,19,12,704],"tags":[3434,214,3612,581,592,3614],"class_list":["post-28041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-applying","category-clearing","category-featured","category-student-blogs","category-student-life","tag-apply-through-clearing","tag-clearing","tag-clearing-2026","tag-marketing","tag-student-life","tag-undergraduate-students"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28041"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28071,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28041\/revisions\/28071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/student-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}