Scholarship Winner Anais Shares Her Story

I’m Anais. I’m from Sydney, and right now I’m studying creative writing at the University of Sydney. I applied to the essay competition online after an email from my school. Coming up to the essay competition deadline, I was sort of aware that I wanted to write something and submit it, but I was still unsure about subjects and things because I had lots of subjects that I’m doing in school and that I’m interested in pursuing and definitely looking through the essay prompts helped. The creative writing one, ‘which key attributes make protagonists likeable’ was such a general, but also a really interesting question. I think it just inspired me to start research on it immediately.

The essay resources were especially helpful, such as the referencing guide, I found those ones very helpful as well as student testimonies about how the essays were constructed – I definitely looked through a lot of them because you do write a 500-word essay very often. So I think definitely in that process of writing it, figuring out which key information to include, which sources to reference, what sort of angle they were looking for in quite these like broad conceptual questions, it was really great having a reference point going into the essay.

Starting my essay, I took a lot of notes, figured out which ones went together well, and then sort of wrote a first draft very quickly after that. In such a creative subject with so much like subject area coursework that you could explore, and different angles you could take on it. In my Immerse classes, the sort of philosophical seminar-based discussions that we’ve been having is really unlike anything that I’ve experienced in school and have been really, really enjoyable.

I sort of slept in on the morning that the results came out. I was not really looking at my phone, but then when I switched it on, I had a text from my mother going congratulations! I was feeling very lucky and very determined to get into the course and make the most out of it. If you do end up going to a course like this, it will enrich your understanding so much.