No . 138 The Trusty Servant
Wiccamica
Pupil Achievements These have been a six months reassuringly dominated by an ever-widening range of academic achievements ; though thinking about linguistics continues to hold many of our brighter pupils in thrall .
Over the summer , Zachary Yen ( Coll , 20- ) represented the United Kingdom in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Brazil , competing in individual and team events , earning a Bronze medal as an individual , and winning the Blue Vase award as part of the team with the highest average score in the individual event .
Meanwhile Rishi Patel ( E , 20- ), and Felix Edmonson ( Coll , 20- ), entered the Linguistics Essay Prize hosted by Trinity College Cambridge . Felix was shortlisted in the top 10 of entrants , and Rishi was awarded one of only three commendation awards and has been invited to Cambridge to receive his certificate . Judges commented that both essays were written to the level of a firstyear university student .
It wouldn ’ t be 2024 without some mention of AI , and The Trusty Servant is no exception , though to the Editor ’ s ignorant perception , these Wykehamical contributions do seem to take the debate some way past the ‘ Look at the new iPhone !’ level .
Victor Lim ( I , 20- ) had a research paper on ‘ Point Clouds with Geometric and Semantic Confidence Intervals ’ accepted by the International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence and travelled to the peerreviewed academic conference in Korea to present it . Not satisfied with this level of international recognition , he also coauthored a paper called ‘ MP-End2End :
Low-Cost 3D analysis of Microplastics with DFF ’ with Henry Ng ( E , 20- ) and Josiah Essiam ( F , 20- ), which was one of only nine papers accepted by the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence , the eight others being written by PhD students .
Back on more traditional ground , Max Collison ( K , 20- ) wrote an essay on the question , ‘ Why was sustained economic growth so rare before the later 18th century and why did this change ?’ which earned him third place in the John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize , and Edward Thomson ( Coll , 20- ) was one of the winners of the Mary Renault Classical Reception Essay Prize , awarded by the Principal and Fellows of St Hugh ’ s College , Oxford , with an essay combining two of his passions , Celtic history and classical literature , which explored the contexts in which the Irish mythological epic Táin Bó Cúailnge was written , and examined its similarities to The Iliad .
Let it never be said that Science School has meanwhile been idle . For the second year in a row a Wykehamist was awarded the prestigious Danckwerts Prize ( see TS 136 ), for the top performer in the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge for Lower Sixth . The twist is that this year ’ s winner , Oliver Jing ( Coll , 22- ), was in MP at the time . His winning performance was supported by that of five other Collegemen , all now in VIBk1 .
You may have noticed that Computer Science now has a place in Winchester ’ s curriculum , and a team of nine Wykehamists pitted their CompSci skills against the nation in the 2024 British Physics Olympiad ( BPhO ) Computational Challenge . The team earned a gold medal , placing in the top five out of 171 entrants .
Chess seems an apt sequel , and many an OW heart will beat faster at the news that JP man Pengxiao Zhu ( B , 24- ) won two of the U14 categories at the British Chess Championships this year ( Rapid and Blitz , for the initiated ), and came third in the Junior Standard and Adult Blitz competitions .
In heartier news , Edward Thomson ( see Classical Reception prize , above ) led a young but eager team of Royal Marine cadets to compete in the notoriously challenging Pringle Trophy competition , coming 6th out of 19 schools .
And finally to the arts : poetry and cricket . The school has elected its first pupil Poet Laureate , Tilly Stanley ( F , 23- ), who thus in some sort joins William Whitehead ( Winchester , 1729-35 , Poet Laureate , 1757-85 ), and delicately circles the poetical careers of Colley Cibber ( Poet Laureate 1730- 57 ), who failed to get into Winchester , and Thomas Warton ( Wykehamistadjacent and Poet Laureate 1785-90 ) whose brother , Joseph ( 1733- ? 38 ), was Headmaster from 1766 to 1793 . The Trusty Servant has not been able to discover whether she will be paid , as is traditional , with a butt of sack . And Sebastian Morgan ( see Sport , above ) who represented England U19 on tour to India as well as competing at the ICC U19 Cricket World Cup in South Africa , has just been awarded a professional contract at Middlesex CC , the first ever pupil to do so . Worthy of a poem ? Answers on a postcard .
CoRo achievements Head of Geography , Ben Pennington ( CoRo , 20- ) co-authored a research article in the peer-reviewed scientific journal , Nature Geoscience in which they analyse the evolution of the Egyptian Nile and explain how climatic
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