When Year 12 student Mietta Paipetis missed a call from the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) this month, she had no idea what to expect.
“It was such a crazy day,” Mietta, who has Greek Cypriot heritage, tells The Greek Herald.
“I mean I’ve been sleeping quite late being a teenager and having nothing to do, so I woke up at 12pm and I saw the missed call… and I had no idea what it could possibly be about.
“I thought, ‘omg they’ve called to tell me that they’ve lost my exam paper or I failed a course or I’m not getting an ATAR this year’.”
When the 17-year-old eventually returned the call, what she heard over the phone line was the complete opposite.
Mietta had in fact received ‘First in Course’ in her Higher School Certificate (HSC) for Chinese Extension.
“I absolutely couldn’t believe it,” she says.
“I actually asked her to check the list about three times to make sure that she had the right person. I still really can’t believe it. It seems like something that I dreamed.”
Whilst the young student definitely didn’t make up the good news, it was a dream come true for her as she’s been passionate about the Chinese language ever since she was introduced to it during an Open Day at her school, SCEGGS Darlinghurst.
“When the teachers were showcasing the languages to us, I absolutely just feel in love with the complexity of Chinese. It’s not only a tonal language, which is different to romance languages, but there’s also character writing – no character is the same, you have to memorise it – and I just loved that,” Mietta says.
“There were so many different things that compose the language and I love challenges, I love puzzles and I love memorising things and all of that just appealed to me when it came to Chinese. So I just fell in love with it.”
This love for Chinese continued throughout Mietta’s entire Year 12 studies and also extended to her other select courses – Physics, Chemistry, Maths Extension 1 and English Advanced.
In the end, her hard work paid off and on Thursday, December 14 Mietta found out she had received an ATAR of 99.7.
She says she couldn’t have achieved that result without the support of her family, school teachers and classmates.
“It’s so fulfilling to know that after working so hard with your classmates and your teachers for so many years and then to be able to achieve so highly and to thank them in such an honourable way and show them how much you appreciated their efforts and support, I think that’s really special,” Mietta explains.
The 17-year-old now plans on studying a double degree of Mechatronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where she has been offered a scholarship.
She stresses that she also has no plans to quit learning the Chinese language just yet.
“So I’m going to be doing a Diploma of Chinese as well at the university,” Mietta says with a laugh.
“I’m not abandoning Chinese, I would never dream of it.”
We wish her all the best in her future endeavours!
