Yesterday was A-level results day, one of the most stressful days in a student’s life. In some ways, it’s even more nerve-racking than sitting the actual exams.

Across the country, teenagers will have logged on to UCAS desperate to see if they had been accepted into their chosen universities, and what the culmination of 14 long years of education has amounted to.

It’s an immense amount of pressure to put on an 18-year-old – to ask them to choose what career they want to pursue, often after no real-world work experience. It’s also a near-impossible task to predict the trajectory your career will take over the course of the next 40, 50, 60 years, when on average a person is estimated to have 12 jobs in their lifetime.

On results day, it feels like the rest of your life depends on this one moment – some of your teachers might even tell you that it does – but it’s just that, a moment in time. It’s one door that opens or closes, that you don’t have to go through if you don’t want to and that you can come back to later if you aren’t ready.

It’s a particularly tough year for this cohort, many of whom haven’t sat exams since they were 11 years old due to the coronavirus pandemic. Their GCSE results were based on teacher grades, and these are the first ‘normal’ results post-pandemic. These exams have been marked with higher grade boundaries than the previous two years.

UCAS figures have already revealed the impact of this too, as the number of pupils accepted onto their first choice university degree course has fallen by 2.6% compared to last year.

The percentage might seem small but that’s over 10,000 students who will have been disappointed to find they are unable to study where they wanted to in September.

Feeling disheartened after results day? Here’s why your grades don’t define your worth