JAMAICAN STUDENT ACCEPTED INTO YALE

Pride, joy and open admiration are overflowing when Alexia Davidson’s parents speak about her.

“My daughter is probably one of the most dedicated students anyone will ever find,” said O’neil Davidson, when the Jamaica Observer sat with parents and daughter at their home in Southfield, St Elizabeth last week.

“She has been an ‘A’ student from kindergarten all the way through high school,” said Davidson of his 18-year-old daughter who graduates from the prestigious all-girls Hampton School in a week’s time.

Alexia’s mother, Kay Davidson, who pointed the Sunday Observer to a cabinet full of trophies testifying to her daughter’s academic achievements, also hailed the teen’s success as a student.

“I couldn’t ask for more as a mother, I couldn’t ask for more from a child,” said Kay Davidson, who is a teacher at Hampton which, for more than 150 years, has produced many of Jamaica’s leading women.

Without doubt, Alexia’s determined and focused approach — which has reaped her 10 distinctions and two credits in CSEC exams and six distinctions at CAPE, among other academic successes — was pivotal in winning a scholarship to one of the most sought after universities, Yale-NUS in Singapore.

A partnership of the 300-year-old US-based Yale University and the National University of Singapore, Yale-NUS accepted its first class in 2013. It is tailored to deliver a four-year liberal arts programme to the brightest and best.

Those in the know say that the meeting of East and West, explicit in the formation of the Singapore-based university, underlines the growing influence and power of Asia, not only economically, but socially and culturally.

“The Yale-NUS Common Curriculum, taken by all students, spans the central knowledge of the Eastern and Western traditions,” reads a promotional insert on the college’s website.

“It is no longer sufficient to read only the great works of the West — a global 21st century career and life requires intercultural communication. Reading Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita alongside Aristotle and Shakespeare, as well as engaging in broad yet rigorous science and social science coursework and research, will train you to think within and between cultures and disciplines to solve complex problems, which is an essential, if not the essential, 21st century professional skill,” the website said.

Leading Jamaican academician Dr Dennis Minott, whose A-QuEST programme prepares top Jamaican students for colleges abroad, told the Sunday Observer that only the top three per cent of applicants make it through the doors of Yale-NUS.

In the case of Alexia Davidson, she is the very first Jamaican. It’s an accomplishment Minott believes is worthy of the greatest respect.

“She has now done what no Jamaican has ever done — to get into a college where the acceptance rate is less than three per cent,” he said.

According to O’neil Davidson, the scholarship will be worth in excess of 90 per cent of Alexia’s college costs, amounting to about US$37,000 per year. He will cover US$2,800 “plus airfare”.

For Alexia, who leaves for her new school in late July, the scholarship to Yale-NUS is a dream achieved. Her ambition is to major in computer science, but the curriculum provides opportunities to explore and travel beyond Singapore’s borders, which she clearly relishes.

“I think it’s an amazing school. It offers a lot of international experience and opportunities to get international experiences,” said the petite, soft-spoken teenager.

Equally, Alexia is fascinated by the reputed order and efficiency of life in Singapore.

“It’s one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world,” she said.

She believes the “experience of going to Singapore, living in Singapore, and then visiting other countries,” will be second to none, while allowing her to “pursue (her) main course of study… which is computer science”.

Singapore, a city-state considered among the world’s most prosperous places, is a ‘world away’, on the other side of the globe, which gave the family pause for thought.

Her father objected strongly at first, since his daughter could have gone to a university of her choice, virtually anywhere.

“At first I didn’t want her to go, to be honest,” he said. “It’s not like other (Jamaican) students who have gone to China, who have classmates and schoolmates who are going along. She will be away (in Singapore) with no one else. That kind of bothered me,” Davidson said.

In the end, he was swayed by the knowledge of his daughter’s strength of focus, strong will and good sense.

‘She is the kind of person who knows what she wants and goes for it,” said the proud father.

That perceived attitude comes up in every discussion about Alexia.

Her mother said she recognised from very early that her daughter was not easily distracted and was in fact a natural leader.

“I knew that she would lead and not be led… she is not easily led, not even by me,” said Kay Davidson, who will travel to Singapore with her daughter for the first two weeks for college acclimatisation.

Minott raised another aspect of Alexia’s personality — creativity — which he felt had a powerful influence on winning her the Yale-NUS scholarship and which will be of immense value in the years ahead.

“It’s not just about being bright,” said Minott. “People talk about the importance of SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test which is used as a measure by US colleges for student admissions), and that is important, but the very best universities are looking for something more, and Alexia provided that”, he said.

He told the Sunday Observer how, in making her college application, Alexia, an animation technology enthusiast, chose the “mind-blowing” option of a cartoon character as a caricature of self in an online PowerPoint presentation.

“To many that would have seemed child-like, but to the discerning mind it was a master stroke,” said Minott.

For Minott, Alexia is a “great soul” with a capacity to empathise with others, and, at the same time, “shrug off foolishness” and irrelevancies. Those qualities, he argued, are invaluable for leaders.

Awareness and empathy for others ensured Alexia became one of the top peer counsellors at Hampton. Kayon Thompson-Whyne, head of guidance and counselling at Hampton, said Alexia was tasked with providing support for “bereaved” students at the school for precisely those qualities.

Alexia’s early schooling was at Munro Preparatory, just down the road from the all-boys’ Munro College at Potsdam, high in the hills of Malvern, midway the journey from Southfield to Hampton.

She recalled that, despite the doubts of one teacher, she excelled at Munro Prep, moving on to Hampton with the “top” GSAT scores.

Her mother provided plenty of guidance, said Alexia, also disclosing she had no difficulty with GSAT. However, she remembers that many of her companions were “stressed out” by the high school entrance exam.

Similarly, at Hampton, Alexia sailed through the first five years of high school life. An average, consistently above 85 per cent, and sometimes above 90, meant she was always on Hampton’s honour roll. To the amazement of her mother she chose to sit 12 subjects at the CSEC level, having to do a few virtually on her own.

“Spanish she took up at fifth form on her own; didn’t go to classes officially,” said Kay Davidson.

Alexia told the Sunday Observer that at first she disliked Spanish but, encouraged by Minott who explained she needed a proper balance between the sciences and humanities, she “took up Spanish” and discovered she enjoyed the subject.

She ended up with the “top grade in Spanish” and “a straight A profile in CSEC Spanish”.

For the record, Alexia excelled at the CSEC level in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Agricultural Science, Spanish, Religious Education, English A, Mathematics, Principles of Business, Information Technology, Human and Social Biology, and Integrated Science. All were achieved with grade one, except for English A and Religious Education with grade two.

At the advanced proficiency level (unit one), Alexia scored grade one in Communications Studies, Chemistry, Biology, and Computer Science, and grade two in Pure Mathematics and Spanish.

For all that, Alexia insists she didn’t find school difficult until the CAPE level at sixth form, and that was because of the high “content” level.

Alexia told the Sunday Observer that through her first four years of high school she maintained no set study timetable.

“I didn’t have a [study] timetable until fifth form when I was doing CSEC. Before that, I just studied when I had a test or something like that,” she said.

According to her, she would get home by 4:00 pm, do her homework and, if she had a test the next day, she would study, and then “do what I wanted to do after that”.

What she “wanted to do” was to head for the computer to take in “facts” and productions which interest her. Most of her reading is done online. “I don’t really read novels and that sort of thing,” she confessed.

Similarly, apart from “the news” she watches very little television. “I can watch anything I want to watch on the computer” — not least animation-related productions, she said.

Life got a little more difficult for Alexia in sixth form, but even then her grades remained exceptional. She doesn’t “panic”, she explained to the Sunday Observer — “getting flustered doesn’t help”.

Nor is she bothered by perceived ‘difficult’ subjects such as Mathematics.

“Math is cool,” she explained. “It’s interesting and it gives your brain a workout… and when you do Math a lot of things in other sciences come together… Everything is Math, everything is based on Math,” she said.

According to Hampton Principal Heather Murray, despite the degree of difficulty at the higher level, Alexia has maintained a better than 90 per cent average at sixth form. As such, she is a member of Hampton’s highest academic strand, the Ladies of the Round Table.

“Alexia is in fact the only sixth form girl this year on my Ladies of The Round Table, with an average of 90 per cent or more,” said Murray, who is herself the Lasco Principal of the Year for 2015.

Alexia hails the “competition” among girls at Hampton — all of whom would have been top performers at GSAT — as well as the high standard of teaching for the success of herself and many, many others at that school down the years.

Now that she is preparing to move abroad for a new phase of her life, Alexia says she is keeping an open mind about career options.

“I am not sure yet,” she said. “Since I am planning to major in computer science, I would like to go on to work with companies like Google or Apple and see where I go from there…” she said.

Yet, she said, she also wants “to work in Jamaica”. She added the rider that “I don’t know if there will be job opportunities, or if they will pay as well as opportunities in other countries”.

Whatever Alexia Davidson does, Murray is certain that it is going to “make Hampton and Jamaica proud, even more proud than she has made us now”.