Let’s start back in 2006.

During my last year of primary school, I was accepted into Sydney Boys High School – a top 5 selective school in the state. This was an unexpected surprise, and I attribute quite a lot of this to luck. I didn’t prepare for the selection school test in any particular way, I was never tutored, I was not pressured academically by my parents, and I did not stand out in primary school. I was a quiet and well-behaved kid, and that was about it.

But here I was, entering one of the most  competitive high schools in the state. And I did not fit into the intense academic environment.

From Year 7 to 10, the story was the same every year. I was always in the bottom 20% of the year for test results. I finished dead last in a few subjects. I did not have much interest. Sometimes, I even skipped classes. While it seemed like everyone else was getting extra tutoring every day of the week, I was swimming. I never had a clear vision of what I wanted to do after high school.

The inflection moment came during a mathematics exam.

The mathematics exams were notoriously hard at Sydney Boys High School. The competition was so fierce and the standards were so high. The teachers needed to make the exam papers extremely difficult to differentiate between all the students. In this exam, I remember sitting in the great hall with 200 other people for the 3 hour exam. The exam paper was about 12 pages long.

I understood about 1 page of it… at most.

Vividly, I remember how terrible it felt to sit in the room where everyone else was powering through the questions, and I was just staring down the clock. I was embarrassed for myself. From then on, I subconsciously made the decision to never put myself in that type of situation again.

So from Year 11, I knuckled down and worked to turn it around.

I figured out some of the ground rules to the game. The school testing system rewards memory recall. And I figured there was a strong relationship between the amount of time I spent preparing and the marks I scored.

I figured while I might not be able to compete with the other students in resources or natural talent, I could work at being the hardest worker and putting in the most time.

For the next 2 years, I put my head deep in the books. Every day, from 9am to midnight or sometimes later. This took a lot of mental strength. It was extreme but I saw it as a challenge to myself, as if I had something to prove.

At the same time, this is when we were deciding on what we wanted to study after high school. It seemed like everyone was chasing medicine, law, commerce, or engineering. I never had any real desire to pursue medicine, and it seemed you needed to have genuine reasons to follow that path.

In the end, I decided I wanted to pursue physiotherapy. I had no real experience or idea of what it would be like. But at the time, I figured it was a good mix of health, sport, and science.

The problem was that the ATAR entry requirements was 98+.

I knew I wasn’t even going to come close. I was projected to score in the low 90’s, but I kept pushing hard anyway. My backup option was exercise and sport science, the ATAR entry requirement was about 87. I think most people would have taken their foot off the pedal and cruised their way to the second option, but I kept pushing hard anyway. The months of grinding could have been viewed as a waste of unnecessary effort, but I viewed it as an opportunity to build my self-discipline and mental strength.

In the end, I scored an ATAR of 95. This was a great score, I scored in the top 5% of the state overall! (For reference, this placed me in the middle of the pack at my high school – around 100th out of 200 students). This was huge progress compared to my previous results. But it was not enough for my first option.

I remember one friend who jokingly laughed at me for working so hard at this ultimately unattainable target. I may not have been able to see it clearly then, but the character traits I developed during that time helped me later in life.

So I started university studying exercise and sport science – with the intention of pursuing physiotherapy down the track. Then something very unexpected happened – I was scoring really high marks at university.

Perhaps this was because I kept the momentum going after high school, or that I had discovered study techniques that worked well for me, or that my real life sports experience was an advantage in this degree. I think it was a combination of those three factors. This was a completely new feeling for me, to be one of the top students in the cohort, and I just kept the momentum going.

At the end of the year, I applied to transfer into physiotherapy with no real expectations. And I was accepted!

So I am now halfway through the 4-year degree, and it has been a great learning and challenging experience so far. We will see what the future holds.