Hangten, was reading your first post and you mentioned about not everyone realising how lucky they are to have this job - are you speaking from experience and if so do you care to enlighten us?!?
I will enlighten you, because there is at least one on every course.
Someone who thinks they are going to breeze through the training, or that it seems to be their given right to achieve a validation.
Hang ten is right - some people never realise just how good we have it. A good job that folks don't mind getting up at silly o'clock in the morning to do.
At Swanwick, we still get nobbers coming for validation training who think that it's going to be a doddle - It's usually easy to spot them. They turn up on their first day out of the college with the brand new MGF or Civic TypeR and a massive mortgage.
Anyway - reading this thread, it seems that those of you bound for the sept 6th course are suitably excited and chuffed at getting to this stage so I wouldn't expect any of you to be categorised as above.
One last thing - although the course has changed recently, the academic side isn't really as intense as you are probably expecting. If you give yourself some time (an hour?) each evening to review what you have learned that day and then study a bit harder closer to exams, you will be fine and have plenty of time to compete for the f@t B'st@rd bar of chocolate in the Seagull pub quiz.
Good luck to the lot of you.
PS: from my original course, one left halfway through 2nd day at CATC; one was a numpty and got nowhere; one left to do some airport ops stuff; One removed self from training at APC radar and another resigned from unit. I think everyone else is a valid ATCO somwhere - NATS or otherwise.