Seventeen-year-old Olivia Fox was named Dux of Ashburton College for 2024 at the school’s year 13 prizegiving last week.
The runner-up award of Proxime Accessit went to 17-year-old Ella Rickard.
Olivia said she wanted to thank her parents for supporting her, especially as her year of study had been ‘‘really challenging’’.
‘‘It involved many, many hours of studying on my own, saying no to hanging out with friends,’’ Olivia said.
She said some friends had high expectations of her at the start of the year, following her being the top academic student over the past two years.
She had told them she could only try her best, not wanting to put too much pressure on herself.
‘‘You can get into a loop of overachieving,’’ she said.
Olivia took the subjects of drama, music, biology, English and philosophy.
She was off to London in January, to do a missions-based course with Youth With a Mission, which has a focus on volunteering in developing countries.
It would be a gap year, as she ultimately aimed to become a counsellor. A secondary educational option would be undertaking a Bachelor of Performing Arts. This year she had co-directed the Ashburton Christian School production Pilgrim (Her Story), with her mother Delia Fox. And she had received distinction in a grade eight singing exam with Trinity.
Ella is next year off to the University of Canterbury. She plans to do a Bachelor of Science with a double major in environmental and biological sciences.
Ella’s passion was science.
‘‘It just makes sense to me, I like learning about how things work.’’
Her subjects were physics, biology, chemistry, calculus and classics.
She said her career could possibly be in research.
