If you work hard, you will reap the rewards as proved by Naparima College students Malique Auguste and Mathieu Beharry who both made it onto the CXC merit lists.
Auguste, 19, from Couva placed third in the Caribbean in building and mechanical engineering drawing (BMED) (mechanical) Unit II and forth in Unit I in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), and is very happy about his achievement.
In addition to BMED, he also did physics, chemistry, pure mathematics, and Caribbean studies.
He told Sunday Newsday he unexpectedly got on the merit list last year for BMED Unit I but he repeated the subject in order to be more competitive for a scholarship. As a result, he was not surprised when he saw his name again.
For Unit II, getting on the list was one of his goals. And since he worked hard, not accomplishing that would have been disappointing.
“Everybody is very happy and proud, very supportive. My mom told me she was jumping up when she read it,” he said.
Auguste admitted he had some challenges with time management since BMED was an extra subject and he had several extra curricular activities.
He said his BMED classes were usually on evenings and Saturdays. Plus, the class entailed a design project which turned out to be more complicated than anticipated. He was also a head prefect so he had to manage the prefect body. He participated in school oratory competitions, in projects as a child rights ambassador with the Ministry of Gender and Child Affairs, was the vice president of the NGO Youth in Action, and continued to update his website, CXC Prep at
cxcprep.netlify.app, where he analysed Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and CAPE past papers to assist students with their studies.
“The main method I used to get through it all was timetabling and scheduling what I had to do. I planned out how I was going to learn depending on the syllabus so I knew what I had to cover on a certain day.
“It can be a challenge to stick to it, especially when there are things out of your control that pop up and you have to miss a day. Then you need to pick back up that work you missed.”
At the moment he is on a gap year, working while he prepares to attend university to study either engineering or computer science. He plans to apply to several universities in the US and Canada, and the schools which accepted him would determine his course.
“If I get through to do computer science I would most likely have more flexibility to do a double major. I’d like to double major in some sort of social science like policy so, when I come back to Trinidad, I could help work on issues and use technology to help further solutions to those issues.”
If he got into a school with a good engineering programme, he said he would not be able to do a double major a those programmes were usually very rigorous. He would still like to work on issues that affect people but he would have to take another route to do so.
“When I was a child rights ambassador I was exposed to public policy and humanitarian efforts
