Chemistry Prize Winners
This summer 7 Concord students were celebrating success in the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (C3L6) – a competition aimed at students in 6.1 (Year 12) but designed to take them well beyond the school chemistry syllabus and encourage university style problem solving.
5 Concord Chemistry students secured gold awards, putting them in the top 15% of entrants. Most impressive of all though was that two students from Concord, Xingzhi and Yik Hei (Hayden), won the highest award possible – the Roentgenium.
Both boys, who are Concord prefects, were among only 73 winners of the Roentgenium out of 14,810 students from schools across the country that entered the competition. This means they ranked in the top 0.5% of entrants.
They were both invited to a residential camp at St Catherine’s College (University of Cambridge) that was held during the school holidays. It provided a wonderful opportunity for them to enjoy themselves and explore chemistry further.
On the first day they took part in a welcome dinner and some socialising which was followed by exploring hydrolysis and oxidation the next morning. They also participated in 4 different hour-long Chemistry practicals which involved Schrodinger’s equation, determining the Rydberg constant, energy levels in electrons and much more.
Xingzhi particularly enjoyed the teaching: “My favourite part of the summer camp was Schrodinger’s equation. I was really impressed by how Dr Wothers taught something quite abstract in a way that was quite understandable.”
Students enter the competition for a variety of reasons, including wishing to test themselves and enjoying a challenge.
For Yik Hei, who participated in the competition both last year and the year before, the motivation was to beat his previous score and prepare for another competition in the coming months: “I decided to enter again because I did it in Form 4 when I got a Silver and this made me discover the fun of Olympiad style questions. Last year I entered again and got the Roentgenium and was delighted so I thought I’d give it another go this year and see if I could achieve it again.”
“I’ve just always really enjoyed problem solving so being able to do hard questions is why I take part in these competitions whenever they are available.”
“The C3L6 is also good preparation for the upcoming UK Chemistry Olympiad held in January. Last year I was 2 marks off qualifying for the next round so I really want to qualify this year. I saw this competition as good practice for that.”
Xingzhi decided to enter to have something else to work on alongside his AS studies: “I wanted to get involved as I like to challenge and stretch myself when I have the time”.
Yik Hei wasn’t able to attend the summer camp at St Catherine College this year but describes the previous year’s as “extraordinary”:
“We met Dr Wothers who was the lecturer at St. Catherine’s college. He also wrote lots of famous chemistry textbooks such as Why Chemical Reactions Happen and Chemical Structure and Reactivity.
“We received lectures regarding Organic Chemistry mechanisms, and introductory quantum physics.”
Roger McBain, Concord’s Chemistry teacher, was delighted with the competition success: “Even to have one of our students win the top prize would have been great but the fact that almost 15,000 students entered and 2 of our students got the Roentgenium is phenomenal.”
Yik Hei is planning to study Physics at a top UK or US University and is already thinking about doing a PhD in Astrophysics. Xingzhi wants to study Computer Science followed by an AI-focused PhD.
