In September 2017, I entered the QQI Level 5 Healthcare Support Course in Longford College of Further Education intending to become a healthcare assistant. I found the course very interesting but also very intensive as the teachers were very thorough and everything was extensively covered but I enjoyed it immensely. We went out in placement in November and I worked in a nursing home which I also enjoyed it was hard work but each day you finished you felt you had made somebodies life a little easier. During this time I started to think was this the path in life I wanted to take? I thought maybe I should enrol in college and see could I take another path in life. I contacted Athlone Institute of Technology about doing the Applied Social Studies Course. I found them so helpful and obliging they even helped me fill out my CAO form. I applied as a mature student and did an interview I continued my studies in Longford College of Further Education and finished them in May and qualified as a healthcare assistant. I started in September 2018, I find it very interesting the course with lots of variety in it as it goes from psychology to art to Spanish and so on. I am enjoying it as you learn a new thing every day and the students and lecturers are very friendly. At the end of July I got notification from the CAO that I had been accepted as a student in AIT to study Applied Social Studies. I got the course because I obtained enough points in my healthcare assistants course, this was fortunate because mature student places are limited on each course and I may not have been lucky enough to get one of them. But I have to say that doing the Healthcare Support Certificate in Longford College of Further Education really helped me so much and by that I mean the teachers were very intensive and in-depth in all the modules we did and you had to work hard to get good grades, because of that I find studying in AIT a lot easier than if I hadn’t done the course in LCFE. So, I would highly recommend it to any student as a stepping stone to third level education. In fact five of my class out of eighteen pupils went on to college to study Applied Social Studies so it shows that it is an ideal way to prepare yourself for College life. Finally I would like to thank all the teachers who teach on the Healthcare Support Course for helping me to further my education especially Nessa who was the driving force for all the class to go to college or become practising Healthcare assistants.