Eighteen-year-old Joshua McKenzie was named Dux of Mount Hutt College for 2024 at the school’s senior prizegiving last week.
Seventeen-year-old Jack Foster was runner-up, awarded Proxime Accessit.
Joshua said he was ‘‘lost for words, pretty shell-shocked’’ when he received the top academic prize.
‘‘I thought there was a lot of people who definitely put in a lot of hard work and deserved to be in the running,’’ Joshua said.
He plans to take a gap year next year, travel to Europe and learn another language. The following year he plans to attend university and do an engineering degree, specialising in aerospace engineering.
He said he was inspired by the challenges of making rockets and aircraft to withstand the extreme conditions of space.
Joshua’s subjects were calculus, physics, chemistry, English and digital technologies.
He was busy studying this week as exams got under way, sometimes more than eight hours in one day. A study routine he found helpful was to study for 40 minutes, then have a 20 minute break to think about what he had just learned.
‘‘I break it up, otherwise you can get bored and overwhelmed.’’
He was grateful to his teachers, a sentiment echoed by Jack.
The Proxime Accessit said he had never been at the heights of academic performance in previous years at school. But he was told by his teachers earlier this year he could have a shot at some of the 2024 academic awards.
‘‘I put my A into G and pushed myself, and made sure all the work I submitted was to the best of my ability,’’ Jack said.
Receiving Proxime Accessit ‘‘was a pretty surreal moment,’’ Jack said.
‘‘I was very, very happy and proud of myself.’’
His subjects were biology, agriculture, statistics, geography and chemistry.
Living on the family arable farm at Highbank, Jack planned to go to Lincoln University next year to do a Bachelor of Commerce majoring in Agriculture.
