I sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny Emo aesthetic bedroom, my laptop balanced on my knees, refreshing the results portal for the third time in thirty seconds. My thumb hovered over the trackpad like it might somehow coax the page to load faster. “Come on, come on,” I whispered, mostly to myself. “You studied. You fucking studied.”

Three years. Three years of this same damn course hanging over my head like a guillotine. Everyone else from my original batch had moved ...