I don't know if this really counts, but throughout my early and mid teens I was convinced I was going to become a scientist. Right up until I started A-level, science was what I was aiming for, and literature was just something I studied for fun. Now, here I am doing an English Lit degree.

I think it links quite closely to a fundamental change in my viewpoint. I used to be a hard-line atheist empiricist. Everything had to add up and be quantifiable. I enjoyed literature and poetry, and even had an academic interest in religion and philosophy, but I didn't think it really had anything worthwhile to say about truth or reality. Then, at some point at around about 16 or so, all that fuzzy, mystical stuff which I had before dismissed as irrelevant started to make sense, whilst all the equations and numbers made less and less sense. From being top of my class in Physics, Biology and Chemistry up till then, I got a D at A-level. The numbers just didn't fit like they used to, and not just academically. Science was no longer the absolute explanation it once was. It was if I saw the world with new eyes.

I hardly recognise that hard-line, atheist empiricist now. I see the world so differently to how I did then. I still have a keen amateur interest in science, but it's no longer the be-all and end-all which it was. It's just one way of looking at the world, not the only way.