At the Cambridge Outstanding Learner Awards Ceremony held on November 23, 32 students from SCIE won the awards. Among them, Gloria Wei gained the Top in the World for AS Geography and shared her learning experience and insights at the awards ceremony. This article is her speech.
Before I offer just a few words, let me first congratulate everyone in this room for their incredible achievements across every subject from Economics to English to Maths. We’ve all worked so hard across these few years towards what we’re truly passionate about, and no matter what, you deserve to be recognized here today. We’re a really, really diverse bunch: in fact, we’re gathered here because of our passions and strengths in different subjects. But we all started from the exact same point: when we knew nothing about them.
Today, I invite us all to consider a question that I never could answer for a long time: where does passion come from? It’s such an important part of our identities nowadays – what we want to learn is a big part of who we are – but where does all of it begin? Is it years of continued diligence and devotion, working continuously towards the pursuit of the same academic subject, or is it a series of happy coincidences that brought us to the paths we now follow? After all, winds are named not for the direction they follow, but the direction they come from – so let’s take a very brief moment to trace how we all began.
When I first asked myself this, I felt confident that the answer came from our innate qualities: an inborn sense of curiosity, something that we could never change, some natural force that decided to push us towards becoming geographers or mathematicians at birth. But as I look back on my four-year journey so far, the way my interest in geography began all seems very random. I was often distracted in geography class at first, in my secondary school. the geographical features I have to memorize was exhaustive, and I never really put in all that much conscious effort – that came later. There was never a marked starting point or a moment of realization that pushed me into geography. As much time as I spent on geography before, there was never anything that even resembled a wide, continuous ocean of effort in the subject, until…
Picture this scenario. Maybe we’ve all been here before. It was four years before, 11 pm on a Sunday night, and I was about to go to bed without a care in the world – until I suddenly remembered there was an upcoming geography assessment tomorrow. Oh no! What shall I do? Unfortunately, the one bottle of coffee I had was only enough to push me through reviewing one past paper, but what luck – my exam question, and I swear I’m not kidding, was that exact question!
This was the first time I’d scored the highest in the class, and if there’s one moment I can point to that spontaneously sparked my love for geography, it would’ve been that one – a completely random burst of luck that turned into encouragement and confidence from teachers and four years of dedication in the subject, all because it showed me I could rise to top, admittedly with a lot of luck. It sounds so illogical when looking back – maybe someone studying psychology could explain this a little better – but that one moment, when I recognized for the first time that I might actually have some potential in geography, was the catalyst for all my passion in exploring textbooks, case studies, and much more.
At first, that passion was nothing more than an ego-trip: I’d tasted what it felt like to be at the top of my class for the first time, although through highly suspicious methods, and I wanted to stay there, but this time, with my own effort. Bit by bit, for every piece of further reading into A-Level textbooks and Cambridge’s recommended books that I read, I felt I was genuinely falling in love with the subject: not just the feeling of accumulating new knowledge or trampling over my supposed competitors, but the comprehensive image of geography as a subject that formed, a whole which was much more than the sum of its physical and humanistic parts. In a way, it was a virtuous cycle I’d never expected. The more we explore and uncover all these enchanting aspects of any subject, the better we apply that knowledge to any scenario, including exams; and the better we do in exams, the more our subconscious tells us to keep going!
Now that we’re on the topic of exploring enchanting aspects, I’ll tell you a funny story about mass extinctions. Yes, really! Before I’d found myself entering this virtuous cycle, I didn’t care about any of the five mass extinction events throughout Earth’s history; dinosaurs were just a pile of miserable bones to me. But studying the geography of climate change – a potential sixth mass extinction event on the precipice of occurring – gave me the opportunity to discover my interest in the history of extinctions I’d never have explored. That same process has happened so many times, with my research into China’s slums and my investigation of traditional Fengshui cultures and so many other things that seemed so outside my comfort zone but were unified by my love for geography. Passion for a subject starts unbelievably small, but it blooms into most vastest, most enormous set of interests you can possibly imagine.
In the end, what I want to say today isn’t that our destiny is preordained, nor that our destiny is decided by a series of random coincidences and accidents, either: It’s that the smallest things make it possible to trigger a passion for any field or subject that might last years, decades, or a lifetime – and we are capable of creating these small inspirations for ourselves, such as one good score on a test, one interesting chapter we’ve read, and for others, pieces of encouragements from my friends and teachers at my wonderful school SCIE with all its opportunities and resources. These seemingly tiny actions, as small as a breeze created by butterfly’s flapping wings, might just amplify our lives in ways we cannot imagine – so no matter who you are, no matter what you think you might be interested in, never be afraid of taking these first steps. Perhaps one day, decades later, we might forget these winds that set us upon our paths, but the greater, more ambitious adventures that follow in the years to come – these are what make our lives worth living.
- Article / Gloria Wei
