DEEP Cove's Naomi Woo was one of 51 young people from 24 countries who were recently selected as Gates Cambridge Scholars.
According to a press release, the successful candidates were selected from a total pool of 3,500 applicants on the basis of their intellectual ability, leadership capacity, academic fit with Cambridge, and their commitment to improving the lives of others.
After graduating from Yale College in 2012 with a bachelor of arts in music and mathematics and philosophy, Woo is now pursuing a masters of music in piano at the Yale School of Music, according to the Gates Cambridge website. Her research at Cambridge will be in performance studies, as she seeks to unite the sometimes disparate fields of musical performance and musical scholarship. She wants to use performance as a means of informing and enriching musicology, treating works of music as experiences rather than merely as texts, which she hopes will help connect music scholarship more closely to its listeners. These studies will also help her present more informed and engaging performances.
As a pianist and conductor, Woo has performed widely locally and at Yale.
She will begin her postgraduate courses at the University of Cambridge in October.
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North Vancouver's Jesse Wray, a Shawnigan Lake School student, recently led a Model United Nations (MUN) conference at his school. According to a press release, 10 schools from across Vancouver Island participated in the simulation of various entities, including the International Criminal Court, a crisis committee, the International Atomic Energy Agency and a general assembly, addressing a variety of historical and current geopolitical issues.
World affairs and politics have always been passions of his and something he has always been interested in, says Wray in the statement. Either through reading the newspaper every morning or debating his father on current events on the car ride to school, he has always been engaged in the world around him.
When Wray joined Shawnigan Lake School two years ago he was presented with the opportunity of joining the MUN group and instantly fell in love.
Wray was further inspired to participate in the political process after visiting the House of Commons in November 2012 with the Shawnigan MUN group, says Shawnigan MUN teacher, Paul Klassen. He also volunteered on a local provincial election campaign.
Wray's interest in MUN has enticed him to pursue political science in university, and he hopes to study at the University of Western Ontario. In the future, he hopes to somehow be connected to the House of Commons and the federal government, he says.
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