Millfield Physicists have excelled in this year’s British Physics Olympiad.
Students across the year groups have been awarded with exceptional marks in the nationwide programme. In the senior challenge, Lower Sixth Solomon Williams and Samuel Le Boutillier achieved gold, both scoring in the top 18% of students sitting the challenge nationally. Lower Sixth Seth Hedgcock achieved a silver along with Year 11 pair, Isaac Searle and Armani Tanna, who sat the exam a year early. A further ten students achieved bronze awards and one student received a commendation.
Thirteen students received awards in the intermediate challenge. Year 11 students Isaac Searle, Jamie Green, Keamen Jones, Jimmy Ji and Vadym Dmytrenko all placed in the top 18% nationally, achieving gold awards. Lily Ulyatt, Tendai Ankude, Alexander Hutchcroft, Willow Walsh were awarded silvers, along with Year 10 students Nidal Shah and Eric Chen who sat the challenge a year early, and Year 11 Lyzander Griffith-McCann and Dagny Davey were awarded bronze awards.
Year 11 and Lower Sixth students have been preparing for the Olympiad by doing practice problems in the popular Friday afternoon Millfield Activity Programme (MAP) session with Mr Wilson and Mr Hudson. The British Physics Olympiad is hosted by the University of Oxford and consists of 40 tricky questions answered in 60 minutes; students are pushed for time as well as being intellectually challenged. Success in Olympiad challenges bodes well for students applying to competitive courses at top universities.
Head of Physics, John Hudson, said,
“We are very excited that our students enjoy working on demanding problem-solving above and beyond their normal studies. The students’ ability to engage with problems in novel areas of physics and at levels beyond that experienced in standard GCSE is very impressive.”
Millfield supports its pupils in a large number of external competitions, including Olympiads in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Linguistics and Informatics, the Intermediate and Senior Mathematics Challenges and more.