A STUDENT at Warrington’s Priestley College has been rewarded by one of the world’s leading universities for an essay she wrote about the representation of women’s lives in ancient Greece.
Kaitlin Wilson, who is on Priestley’s High Achievers’ Programme, received a Certificate of Commendation after entering her work into the Fitzwilliam Essay Competition.
As a further reward she was invited to the University of Cambridge – a world leader in Humanities – for a tour of Fitzwilliam College with Dr Sara Owen.
She said: “I had planned to apply to the University of Cambridge before I took part in the essay competition due to their amazing History degree and the tutorial style of teaching,”
“However, after visiting Fitzwilliam College, I decided to apply to that college in particular due to its amazing campus.”
Kaitlin, a former pupil at Lymm High School, heard about the Fitzwilliam Essay Competition through the High Achievers’ Programme at Priestley.
During those weekly sessions she worked on improving the essay, looking at how to make her argument more precise and her writing more fluent.
“This essay gave me the opportunity to not only communicate these long-held beliefs, for example, I had wanted to explain the horrific misogyny in Aristotle’s work for some time, but also to construct an essay at my own pace, and enjoy the process,” she said.
Kaitlin’s essay focussed on the representation of women’s lives in ancient Greece, discussing the depiction of women on an oil flask from the time period and whether this was an accurate representation.
She was drawn to the question because of her interest in women’s history and her love of analysing historical sources from a feminist perspective.
After finishing her A-Levels in Classical Civilisation, History, English Language and Literature, her goal is to study at either Cambridge or Manchester.
Kaitlin said the support she had received at Priestley was helping her to prepare for the rigours of university interviews and study.
“It has been extremely helpful in allowing me to prepare for my Cambridge interview if I should be asked to attend one,” she said.
“It has also been a way of challenging me to overcome my fears of verbal communication as a person with ASD, and I have actually been able to enjoy the academic experience of communicating my ideas through these exercises.”
