Peterhouse Essay Competition

Punting on the River Cam

A few months ago I decided that I would put some time into writing an essay for the Peterhouse College, Cambridge Kelvin Science essay competition for the sake of being productive over christmas. Keep in mind that this was at a time when I thought AS-levels would be a walk in the park like GCSEs and that revision that early would be an utter waste of time. Turns out that AS-Levels were not as I had thought, hence the grand total of 194 past papers done in the run-up to the exams! A word of caution: do not underestimate the A-Level!

In any case, after several weeks of work, researching and writing the essay, I finally sent it off and began the long-overdue panic for the end of year exams. A bit of background to the competition: Peterhouse College, based in Cambridge, run annual science, english and history essay competitions, with set titles and a 4,000 word limit. The winner of each competition receives a cash prize, and, along with the second place and highly commended candidates, are invited to attend an awards luncheon at the college.

One day in June, I received a letter with the Peterhouse College letterhead. Tearing the envelope apart, they informed me that my essay had been highly commended, and that I was invited to the awards luncheon and to stay the night in the college’s accommodation! As you can imagine, it was all very exciting! So on the 26th of June, I made my way to Cambridge from Kings Cross Station in London, found my way to the college and was directed to my room for the night. Unfortunately, I had arrived late, so I missed the dinner, but Cambridge offered a host of places to eat well for a decent price. I managed to find some other prizewinners in the accommodation later that evening, and we stood in the hallway discussing universities, our essays and how one individual believed it to be disrespectful to a book if it is read in the late evening, when one cannot fully focus on it. Fascinating stuff, I have to say. We stood and chatted until about 12:30am.

The Other Side of the Fence

We meet again, dear readers. On the other side of the proverbial exam fence. There have been many a hurdle and many a challenge, but we are all done with it now! It has been a wonderful month, filled with ups, downs, surprises and boredom, and I congratulate my peers taking GCSEs and AS levels. It's all done for one more year. All the best to the A2 candidates, who still have a few action-packed weeks ahead of them.

I have already done my exam board run-down in my previous post, so I will not bother with another. If you want to see my reaction to some of the papers, I point you to my twitter profile, where the occasional tweet to OCR wasn't an uncommon occurrence!

I must point out that my writing skills have gone promptly down the drain, seeing as I had 10 mainly maths-based exams for which I had to prepare. The only reason why I can string together a full sentence without mentioning an OCR key word impulsively [Van der Waals! Minimum energy!] is because I had to write a German essay in my one German exam. Looks like my contrasting AS choice wasn't a bad move after all!

A lot has happened these past few weeks, notwithstanding the exams! Most notably perhaps, is the letter I received a few weeks ago, informing me that the essay I had written for the Cambridge Peterhouse Kelvin science essay prize had been highly commended, and that I had been invited up to Cambridge to overnight and have a formal lunch at Peterhouse college! That is taking place this week, so I am very excited! I also did a paper count to see how many past papers I had done for preparation for these exams. The grand total is 194, 140 of which are maths papers! So, in a year of approx. 6000 waking hours, I spend 300 on maths alone (not including marking time). That's 5% of my year, which is approx. 30 days - including sleeping time. That's a lot of time. I really hope I get the grades I want!