Wellington College Tianjin Receives Another Cambridge Offer
We are delighted that Frank, a Shuping Scholar here at Wellington College Tianjin, has received an offer from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to read Mathematics. Frank has been with us for three years and has proved to be a popular and valued member of the Wellington community. Once again this year, we have been lucky to have had such dedicated and accomplished Oxbridge applicants, as Frank’s news follows so soon after our Oxford offer in early January.
Frank’s A Level pathway to Cambridge was obviously driven by his passion for mathematics, but one of the advantages of an A Level programme is that there is the time to undertake deeper personal research outside the core subject areas of the course. Frank was able not only to engage in a highly specialised area of mathematics, but also to develop numerous life skills through undertaking an Extended Project Qualification. Perhaps the most valuable one of these came in improving his articulation of academic ideas - particularly to non-specialists - a communication skill which has helped him develop self-confidence and fluency in presentations.
His final project was an evaluation of China's 'lockdown' and 'centralised treatment' response strategies through Covid pandemic modelling, in which he applied different mathematical models to analyse the responses to the pandemic. Although Frank met numerous difficulties along the way, he quickly learned to adapt and overcome the issues to create a very interesting final project. This project required him to apply some very complex mathematics and he confidently communicated his findings in a presentation to a large group of teachers and fellow students.
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Jayne Sabio the Head of the University Guidance team said that, “Frank has flourished tremendously during his time studying at the College and latterly as a Head of House. I feel that he will be a great asset to any university and is a truly able and outstanding student.”
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“Frank is an exceptionally talented young man,” commented Julian Jeffrey, the school’s Executive Master. “He is a Shuping scholar and has been working tirelessly with his teachers and tutors to achieve his goal. Frank has long held an ambition to study mathematics at Cambridge, and I am thrilled that we have been able to support him in his success story. At a time when winning a place at any of the world’s foremost universities is harder than ever, Frank and his teachers deserve huge credit for this offer.”
Delighted at the news Frank said, "I have always enjoyed studying mathematics as a way to apply logical thinking and as a method to solve problems. In Chinese, the word, ‘Shu Xue’ means mathematics, and it literally translates as ‘learning of numbers’. Hence, for a long time, I understood maths as a subject that only teaches us how to calculate numbers. That was until I read the book ‘FLATLAND’ by Edwin. A. Abbott. The author explored a fantasy world in which some citizens existed in two dimensions whilst others existed in three and a fundamental conceptual difference between the two groups was the idea of ‘Upward instead of north’. This metaphoric expression inspired me to stand in a ‘higher dimension’ and review my previous learning and understanding. In doing this, I found that the scattered knowledge of learning two-dimensional maths formed a 3-D mathematical landscape in my mind. I look forward to taking these thoughts and theories in Mathematics onto my next stage of learning at such a prestigious University.”
Congratulations also go out to our Wellington community in Shanghai as they celebrate an offer for Law at Cambridge. This shows the strength across the Wellington group of schools and the quality of the education provided.