Nine Old Elizabethan friends whose careers have taken very different paths found time to pass on tips to young pupils when they met up for a reunion at the School.
All but one of the group from the Class of 2016 (those who started at QE in 2009) were from Broughton House, and so they duly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to the young Broughtonians of today.
They also seized the chance to meet up with some of their old teachers and to marvel at the changes to the School campus since they left.
Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It was good to learn that this group still retains great affection for their alma mater and to see that friendships formed at QE really do stand the test of time, even with some of this group having left before Year 13 (including one of their number, Brian Yoon, moving to South Korea as early as Year 9).”
The visit was arranged after one of the group, Alexander Ng, contacted Headmaster Neil Enright.
First stop was a trip down memory lane with a visit to 7B’s form time, where Languages teacher Marie-Jo Jacquin is still the form tutor, just as she was in their day back in 2009.
They then did a careers ‘speed-dating’ workshop in which they introduced their roles and industries, and the key skills and routes into it, to small groups of Year 8 boys. The group included doctors, engineers, a lawyer and a representative of the film industry. There was an opportunity for the boys to ask questions of the visitors.
As well as being taken on a tour of the campus, the group also caught up with some familiar faces, including: the Headmaster; Deputy Head (Pastoral) David Ryan; Sarah Westcott Assistant Head (Pupil Progress); Mathematics teacher & Head of Academic Administration Wendy Fung, and Head of Physics Jonathan Brooke.
The nine were:
- Three medical doctors: Alexander Ng, who went to UCL and is now at Barnet Hospital; David Hao, and Michael Yeung (Cambridge);
Two engineers: mechanical engineer Lampojan Raveenthiranathan, who studied at UCL and now works for a company which designs and manufactures components for military aircraft ejector seats, and civil engineer Roderick Lee;- Brian Yoon, who works in finance;
- Prahlad Patel, who studied Actuarial Science at City University, but is now in the film industry and has been working on Season 5 of Netflix’s The Crown, digitally refining the images;
- Lawyer Meer Gala-Shah;
- David Dubinsky, who read Physics & Astronomy at Durham.
Eight of the group were from Broughton, with odd man out Michael Yeung, of Leicester House, made an honorary Broughtonian for the day.