Exam diary:My name is Miroslawa Gorecka and I come from the south of Poland. I moved to Ireland in 2005 with my mother, who is a doctor.

I too hope to become a doctor and the Leaving Certificate is the route I have chosen to take me into medicine - hopefully. I started the Leaving Certificate programme halfway through fifth year at the age of 15, taking up English, maths, business, chemistry, biology and Polish.

Some of these subjects I am studying for the first time. All the courses are quite new to me.

I am nervous about sitting down to do my Leaving Certificate this week, but I have been working hard. I live in an apartment in Drogheda where there is no TV, no radio and no computer. I have no Bebo, Big Brother or pop culture to distract me. The Irish general election came and went almost unnoticed in my life, although I am usually quite interested in politics.

Making the change from the Polish education system to the Irish one was not as hard as I thought it would be. Because I left Poland in the middle of my Junior Certificate (the Polish one, I mean), I wanted to finish what I had started.

I spent the first six months as a Leaving Cert student in Ireland travelling to Poland every two weeks to complete my Junior Cert and sit my exams there. I like a challenge.

The Polish education system is very academic and we have no choice in the subjects that we study. There are 15 subjects in total including the three science subjects, music, art, technical graphics and community studies.

We also study maths, Polish, English, geography and history to a very high academic level.

While points for medicine are only taken from our top five subjects, we have to pass all of them to get into college. Coming to Ireland and only having six subjects to study has been easy by comparison.

Leaving Poland was hell. I left family, friends, a job in a veterinary clinic, a passion for skiing and many other beloved things behind. There's not much skiing in Ireland but my mother is here and I've made new friends at Drogheda Grammar School.

We're not the kind of friends that go out partying every weekend - we're all studying too hard - but we're there for each other and that's important.

We did go out to celebrate our graduation. Getting in to a night club at 16 years of age took a bit of imagination. However, I like the way you can go out in Ireland and dance and have a good time without drinking. In Poland there is terrible pressure on young people to drink from about the age of 12. The social life is better here and more relaxed.

Settling in here has been quite easy for me as I find Irish people very tolerant and respectful of other human beings, even if they have not much money or have not achieved much in their lives. I think there's more pressure in other places to prove yourself to get respect.

Even though I love Ireland, I fight with my Irish friends all the time about which country is better. I reckon that Poland beats Ireland when it comes to our language. We still speak ours and the Irish don't. We also have a summer and a winter every year, instead of every day.

I need to get 570 points in the Leaving to study my first CAO choice, which is medicine in Trinity College Dublin. I feel good about all the subjects except English and Polish. Yes, Polish.

No school teaches it as a subject in Ireland and so I have had to find the exam papers from the last couple of years and try to figure them out for myself. It should be easy for a Pole to get an A1 in Polish, but I don't really know what's coming and that's making me very nervous indeed.

If I don't get medicine, I will hopefully get my other choice, forensic science.

However, I will have a good idea how things are going after tomorrow, when the dreaded English exam is over. Paper 1 will be the most difficult for me as I will have to compose in a language that is not my own.

Because I haven't had any contact with radio, television or the internet in such a long time, I'll have some trouble if the essay questions are all about celebrities and politicians. An essay about coming to Ireland as a 16-year-old Polish girl would be absolutely perfect. Do you think there's much chance of that?

Tomorrow: Miroslawa gets ready for D-Day.