Parkgate 2008-2010

I have always been a keen musician and Parkgate gave me many opportunities to perform and develop my musicianship. I sung in Senior Choir and Chamber Choir while I was at Parkgate and was taught the recorder by Mr Wooton which I loved and continued after Parkgate.

Parkgate helped me to earn places and scholarships at St Paul’s Girls School, Emmanuel School and Francis Holland, Sloane Square. I chose Francis Holland, where I stayed for the whole of my secondary education. After learning the recorder at Parkgate, I studied chamber music with a specialism in violin and Baroque Recorder at CYM at the Guildhall School whilst at secondary school. I am currently a second year undergraduate at the University of Oxford, where I am studying physics. I also hold an academic scholarship, as well as a choral scholarship at the Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford. Parkgate gave me my first opportunity to sing in harmonies – unusual for a Primary school because it’s a difficult skill! Choral music is now a big part of my life. As a Choral Scholar at Oxford I sing three services to the public a week, produce several recordings a year, sing concerts and tour all over the world.

Apart from that, if I am not studying physics, journalism takes up most of my time and in March 2021, I won the Oxford student journalism prize – the Geddes Prize. In January 2020, I founded The Oxford Blue, Oxford University’s first new student newspaper in 30 years (www.theoxfordblue.co.uk). Since we started at the beginning of the year, we have published pieces by 300 different authors, most of those new writers, regularly get 1 million+ monthly hits on our website, and we recently won Best New Publication at the SPA National student journalism awards. Our articles have been picked up by the national press 30 times, and stories I have broken have been reported on by the BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian and The Times, as well as international news outlets. I have also spent time on my own writing during lockdown and I have recently had opinion pieces published in the SundayTelegraph and The Spectator.

Parkgate encouraged my love of science, offering extension work and the Primary Maths Challenge, which was a brilliant steppingstone to the UKMT Maths Olympiads I took in secondary school, and my eventual study of physics at Oxford. If circumstances permit I will intern in Cold Plasma Physics at the University of Bologna in the summer.