Diocesan Student Tops NCEA Scholars With 3 Firsts

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

17 MARCH 2009

Diocesan Student Tops NCEA Scholars With Three Firsts

Former Diocesan School student Emily Adlam is the only student in New Zealand to come top in three scholarship subjects – Physics, Statistics and Latin – since 2004.

Emily is also the only student who gained six Outstanding Scholar Awards in last year’s scholarship exams. Her other three subjects were Calculus, English and Chemistry.

“It is so rare to have a student like Emily who is so talented across the board. When we get students like this we absolutely treasure them and challenge them at the level they are working at which is far beyond that of a high school curriculum,” says Diocesan’s Deputy Principal Academic Jayne-Ann Young.

“Students like Emily are intrinsically driven. She cannot leave a problem unsolved.

Through the enriched and accelerated individual programme we offer at Dio, Emily has been able to experience her vast areas of interest from Latin to high level Physics.”

Success is certainly no stranger to multi-talented Emily, who at 18 is already an accomplished musician, scientist, debater, poet and writer who says she is currently writing her fifth novel in her “spare time”.

Her many achievements include receiving a rare Royal Society of New Zealand Gold CREST award for an 18-month renewable energy research project she completed last year and being the top-scoring New Zealander at the 2008 Chemistry Olympiad in Budapest. Last year she received A pluses for two papers she took at Auckland University.

However Emily says her scholarship results still took her by surprise.

“I did not come out of the exams thinking that I had done really well and I didn’t feel any different about how I did in the subjects I ended up coming first in,” says Emily, who thinks NCEA is a good system and prepared her well for the scholarship exams.

“At one point I weighed up between doing Cambridge and NCEA, so I compared them closely. Some people say NCEA is too easy to pass. But at excellence level I think some of the NCEA questions require more depth of thinking and problem solving.”

Diocesan School for Girls now offers its students a dual educational pathway which allows them to study for either the NCEA or the two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma which the independent all-girls Anglican school started teaching at the beginning of 2008.

This year Emily has started a conjoint Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degree at Auckland University in Physics and Philosophy.

“Physics and Philosophy complement each other because they are different ways of approaching the same questions about how the world works.”

Her longer term plans include completing a PHD then working in scientific research.

“I’m very interested in energy research and also in quantum theories of the mind. I would love to be part of the collaborations between physicists and neuroscientists that are happening around the world.”

Emily doesn’t watch television and is a fast reader, but even so, it’s hard to imagine how she finds time for her study and all of her interests.

“The secret of fitting a lot of things in is that I do a lot of different things. One of them is a break from doing the other, so it becomes a form of recreation.”

As well as New Zealand authors Maurice Gee and Janet Frame and Canadian authors Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood, Emily admires British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Nobel Peace Prize winner Alan McDairmid.

“He (McDairmid) discovered how to make plastic conduct electricity – that really got my imagination going.”

Emily is one of 10 students nationwide this year to win the NCEA Premier Award which is worth $30,000 to be paid over three years and one of 47 students to win one or more Outstanding Scholar Awards.

She will receive her Premier Award and three Top Subject Scholarship Awards at a ceremony in Wellington on May 14.

Ends

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