From stacking shelves to stacking up marks
A young man who started out stacking shelves in his family’s Taranaki dairy has won the top mark in the world in a physics exam.
Henry Chen, now 18, grew up in the small Taranaki town of Stratford, where his Chinese-immigrant parents ran a dairy.
The whole family moved to Auckland in 2015, to a street just around the corner from Auckland Grammar School so Henry and his twin brother, Kevin, could attend the school.
Tonight Henry will be honoured in a ceremony at Eden Park as New Zealand’s top overall student in the Cambridge international exams for 2017, and top in the world for A-level physics.
He scored 98 per cent in physics, 97 per cent in maths, 96 per cent in chemistry and 95 per cent in biology.
Henry, who was also dux of Auckland Grammar, said his parents were always ambitious for him and Kevin and their older brother Michael, who recently completed a medical degree at Otago University.
“My parents, coming from a strict Chinese family, always wanted me to do well in my studies,” he said.
“For the first half of my life it was more my parents forcing me, and at the end it kind of grew on me. I started to enjoy and feel proud of my achievements.”
He said the family lived for a short time in Auckland, where he was born, before moving in about 2002 to Stratford, where they lived in a house attached to their dairy.
“I helped out a bit,” he said. “I just like stacked the shelves — not the counter work, because then I had to talk to people!” He had a year at Stratford High School in Year 9, then a year at Francis Douglas College in New Plymouth before the family moved back to Auckland.
He will study medicine at Sydney University. Kevin will take a similar course at Auckland University.
His advice to others? “I’d say to not procrastinate, basically to spend your time efficiently,” he said.
“I remember in my earlier years I’d always be on Facebook whenever I was studying. At the end, I didn’t stop procrastinating, but I minimised the time that I was.”
He also recommends getting plenty of sleep.
Other NZ students who topped the world in their Cambridge subjects in 2017 were Aimee Erskine, Pinehurst School, Lara Hodgson, King’s College, Jessica Wu, ACG Parnell College, Jessica Cowie and Sam Anderson, Cashmere High School, and Shray Kamath, St Peter’s College.