The third Friday of May is always an exciting day in the life of a young Wellington scholar as it sees the culmination of the Matt Oakman Prize for Academic Extension. The Third Form Academic Scholarship programme is a smorgasbord of different activities, where students are introduced to different topics each week ranging from Astronomy to Linguistics, Philosophy to Debating, and Engineering to Ecology. The scholars are then asked to conduct in-depth research into a question that emerged from one of the topics that particularly inspired them.

The presentation evening sees the scholars produce a research poster that synthesised their findings into a concise and attractive format, and answer questions from parents, academic staff, and peers about the journey their research had taken them on.

Congratulations to our winner Polina R, whose research into ‘how the distribution of Covid vaccines impacted their effectiveness’ impressed the judges, and to runner-up Raghav R, whose work on the different types of consciousness also stood out.