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Canberra Today 24°/27° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

World of science calls to curious, young Canberran

YEAR 12 student Rebecca Mackney is dreaming of London, Paris and Geneva, but it’s not a gap year she’s looking forward to.

In London in late July, she’ll be visiting some of the UK’s top scientific research institutes through the International Youth Science Forum, which she was selected to attend along with students from 50 other countries.

“Then there’s an extra program when the London program finishes, where we go through Paris to Geneva to visit CERN, which is a scientific institution there that houses the Large Hadron Collider, which is a pretty famous piece of equipment,” she says.

No kidding. The LHC is the world’s biggest atom smasher and recently, produced evidence for the existence of the theoretical Higgs Boson, something so important to our understanding of the universe that it earned the nickname, “the God particle”. To science-mad Rebecca, going to see it is a pretty big deal.

“I’ll get to see what the rest of the world is doing in science and bring those ideas back to share with the youth science community in Australia, and to learn things that I could bring back to help in my community that maybe we don’t do so much here,” she says.

After Year 12, the Trinity Christian School student has a clearer idea than most of what she’ll do next.

“I’m definitely looking at the field of health sciences, and I think I’d really like to work somewhere in rehabilitation,” she says. “So that could be working with the elderly, but also people who’ve had accidents or strokes and are recovering from things like that.”

It was her love of science, and later human biology, that first led her to think of working in healthcare. It also led her to the National Youth Science Forum in Perth at the start of this year. She was among 31 students accepted by the international program, out of more than 400 who attended the NYSF this year.

The only slight problem is the trip costs more than $10,000, but the hard-working student is not fazed. She’s already asked 95 companies and organisations for assistance, including Rotary clubs, the Academy of Science and the CSIRO, on top of fundraising within her school community, and applying for a student grant offered by the ACT Government.

 

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Ian Meikle, editor

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