A 20,000 word essay, testing the laws of physics and handling livestock are just a handful of the eclectic ways students across New South Wales have topped their HSC courses this year.
The 131 students from more than 80 schools were revealed at a ceremony at the University of New South Wales on Tuesday. Four students topped more than one course, and 33 achieved equal first place.
Guardian Australia spoke to some of the excited year 12 graduates.
‘First place, you’re joking’
Walla Walla graduate Jorja Barnett was straight on the phone to her agriculture teacher when she found out she had topped her primary industries subject. “He was like – ‘you legend, that’s mad’,” she says with a laugh. “First place, you’re joking.”
The St Paul’s College student is one of four country girls who have come equal first in the course, which covers everything from fencing to driving a tractor and drenching sheep.
None of them knew each other until the ceremony, though Barnett lives just an hour away from Red Bend Catholic College student Freya Hooper in Forbes.
The pair of generational farmers travelled five hours to get to the ceremony, with Barnett waking at the punishing hour of 4am.
“Our industry is very male dominated, so to see us all come out on top is great,” she says. “A lot of this is our background – you get to put where you grew up into the classroom.”
A student at Scots All Saints College at White Rock, Poppy Starr, was attracted to the subject for the preparation it gave her for the industry.
“We have cattle at school, so ours was all cattle-based,” she says. “Some run sheep, some run other livestock … it’s about getting you ready for the workplace.”
Josephine Galcsik, of St Philip’s Christian College at Cessnock, has studied agriculture since year 8, spurred on by her love of horses.
“As soon as it was an option for me, I jumped on it straight away,” she says.
Reconfirming Newton’s law
Alex Zheng Qin’s initial reaction to getting a call from the NSW government was concern.
“It was really vague and ominous,” he says. “I thought they’d lost my paper or I spelt my student number wrong.”
In reality, the Knox Grammar School student was being informed he’d topped his investigating science course – a dynamic subject that allows students to choose their own self-directed project.
They learned the fundamentals – Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, the structure of DNA – and then tested their knowledge in the laboratory.
Zheng Qin decided to test the physics law of torque – in his words, “because it was the simplest thing to measure”, and reconfirmed the mathematical formula.
In layperson’s terms, the law is one of rotational force – “the longer the distance, the more rotation will occur when you apply the use of force”.
If he attains a 95 for his Atar, Zheng Qin plans to apply to UCL in England and pursue biomedical engineering.
“I see science as a way for humanity to progress,” he says. “Why can’t we put a smashed plate back together?”
‘When you lose something, you really value it’
When Asteer Saleem arrived in Australia from Iraq five years ago, she spoke no English and had missed her entire primary school education.
Now, the St Mary Catholic College student speaks four languages and has graduated first in the state from the Secondary College of Languages in Arabic extension.
“When you lose something – you really value it,” she says.
“I’m thankful of the events I’ve been through, as much pain as it’s caused, it was all for a purpose … I value education so much, it’s the strongest tool that we have in this world.”
Saleem started HSC with a string of science and mathematics subjects but then flipped.
“I was like – that’s not me, I’m not doing what I want to do,” she says.
She switched to humanities courses three weeks in, and graduated with English, Arabic, legal studies and community family studies, and is planning to go on and study law.
Arabic extension was her favourite subject – “it has its own magic,” she says. “You express yourself differently in it.” But she doubted how she would go – she couldn’t even read the Arabic alphabet when she arrived in Australia.
“My teacher kept saying ‘you’ll get it, you’ll get it’ but when I came out of the exam I was crying, I was like, ‘I’m not going to do well’,” she says.
“Then I got a call from an unknown number … I wasn’t going to answer it,” she says. “They told me and I was like – ‘are you serious, oh my God, is that real?’”
‘Oh, I’ve written 20,000 words’
Abigail Barfield learned about the First Fleet and the Stolen Generations in her early education, but it was the vast gaps in her knowledge that drew her to Aboriginal studies in the HSC.
The Pymble Ladies College student says the freedom of the course was its most exciting component – students were able to decide their own major work, drawn from any aspect of First Nations culture.
“There were no limits, so I wrote a 70-page, 20,000-word thesis on Aboriginal poetry and its applications,” she says. “The title of my work was ‘Contemporary Aboriginal poetry and expressing voice, culture and truth’.”
Dozens of interviews backgrounded the work, which included more than 30 poets and pieces of poetry.
“I’m the type of person that if I start something and have all this information … I don’t want to cut it down,” she says. “I loved writing it … and then it was like, ‘oh, I’ve written 20,000 words.”
