Some time later...

What an enormous gap, and a chaotic few months to fill it!

I had left off my last post asking “What’s the next step?”...the next step was in fact the SAT’s.


There are some things you think you’ll never do again...sitting end of high school standardised tests would most definitely be one. When I bounced out of my final HSC exam like an excited Tigger last November I never dreamed that, in a few months I would be back, sitting more tests, worrying about results that would determine my future. But, with the discovery and attainment of the Robertson scholarship my ATAR became obsolete and my SAT marks everything.

Now the SATs were merely to confirm my place at Duke, and I’m sure most Robertson’s would just breeze through them. Unfortunately for me I have been blessed with an outstanding mathematical...ineptitude (I blame Mum). I had dropped the vicious subject the moment I could, at the end of Year Ten in Australia.

I sat, horrified at the computer in France, envisaging my scholarship vanishing before my eyes. I suddenly vividly recalled a scene from about two and a half years ago. That day had been my last ever lesson of Maths. It had just turned dark outside, my puppy Rufus was at my heels as I dumped reams of paper, text and exercise books on the pavement. Mum nodded at me, “Do it”, she said. As I lit the pile I felt a sense of overwhelming exhilaration as I watched the flames lick. Mathematical formulas, equations and exercises were never to be encountered again...or so I had thought.


My bonfire didn’t seem so finite now.