It was with some disappointment that I recently learned that nearly two thirds of people in the UK give up on their dream career by the time they are the tender age of twenty years. Many of these people - one in four to be precise - stated that they gave up due to a lack of confidence, while 31% stated that they didn't feel they had the right skills.

I thought this year, my first year spent being in my twenties, I should try some things I've always wanted to do but never got round to doing. I feel like I should do something with my life other than my university work or nurse a hangover over the weekend but, also, to borrow from the words of so many others, to try and make the most of being young.

My design philosophy is rich, luxurious and desirable, in the sense of a woman see's it, wants it and has to have it. I want my name to associate with this feeling. I want my graduate collection to be on the same level as Haute Couture, when I design I want my clothes to be segmented with this category.

Why doesn't this ambitious, motivated straight-As sixth-form student from one of London's inner suburbs know how to get into town, a distance of around five miles?

I hadn't been back to St Anne's for two decades and had avoided mailing lists. So I'd never realised some of the authors, journalists and broadcasters I most admired had slept in the same shoebox rooms and drunk in the same windowless college bar years before me.