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Over the past couple of years, Jonathan Gunaseelan has done innovative fundraising for UNICEF, taught children in Tanzania, Cardiff and London and helped develop a water filtration system for first-nation Canadians.

All these opportunities, and others besides, have come about through Warwick University, where Jonathan (OE 2008–2015) is now completing his Civil Engineering degree.

“Warwick has provided me with an incredible platform to excel in both engineering and general life. Being the university with the highest number of societies for students to get involved with, you’re always busy and always meeting new people!

“Being a part of a campus university was something I was sceptical about before joining Warwick. But it’s like living in a little bubble where you know so many of the people, you get close with everyone very quickly!”

He recently returned to the UK after an exchange year in Canada, where he studied at Western University in Ontario. “Canada was incredible to say the least; a proper leap out of my comfort zone and a test of independence! I undertook several group projects, perhaps the most interesting being the development of a water filtration system for first-nation communities. Another project was a pavement design, as well a truss structure.

“Beyond academics, I was heavily involved with UNICEF and organised a fundraising initiative called FAST24 (a sponsored fast), which became a huge success.” There is now even talk of it becoming a national UNICEF campaign in Canada, Jonathan reports. “I got the opportunity to talk to the CEO of UNICEF Canada [David Morley, pictured left] and was invited to their annual AGM.”

In addition, he was involved in cultural societies and represented the university in dance performances in Toronto.

Jonathan has also taken part in the Insight Programme, which is part of Government’s Teach First initiative – “another amazing opportunity”.

After an initial week of training, personal development and workshops in London, he and his fellow trainees spent a week in Wales teaching at the Hawthorn High School near Pontypridd. “We got a hands-on approach to teaching and to tackling issues which teachers face every day!”

Between Canada and Teach First, Jonathan spent six weeks in Tanzania as part of Warwick University’s Warwick in Africa programme.

He spent this period at Mtwara Technical Secondary School in the city of Mtwara in the south-east of the country. Like QE, it is a selective school. It was a memorable experience, he says, during which he was struck by the lack of resources. “The painful part was that all the children were so keen to learn but didn’t have books.”

As he enters his fourth year at Warwick, Jonathan is looking forward to serving as a Team Leader, managing a group of undergraduate student helpers working to ensure that new students are happy and comfortable.

Through completing Teach First, and upon completion of its Insight Programme, he has received an offer to take part in the two-year Leadership Development Programme to become a fully qualified teacher.

“As for my longer-term ambitions, I am currently taking one hurdle at a time. I have my dissertation and group project this year, on the development of busways for megacities and the development of a new building worth £500m. I hope to dive further into either of these fields once I graduate, within construction or transportation.”

He maintains close friendships with a number of Old Elizabethans. “It’s amazing how all our lives have gone in different paths yet we always come back together to fill each other in, catch up and have a good laugh! Top tip to current students: forget quantity, and look for those few special friendships you form at QE that will come with you forever!”

Old Elizabethan Piers Martin was part of a relay team that successfully swam the English Channel and raised more than £6,000 for Autism East Midlands.

Yet, even though the team were eminently suited to the challenge – Piers (OE 1987–1994) is a high-performance sport and business consultant and a former national-level swimming champion, while two of his fellow team-members are water polo coaches – the swim almost didn’t happen.

The authorising organisation – the Channel Swimming and Piloting Association (CSPA) – gives teams such as Piers’ a window of only just over a week, he explains. “After the glorious weather we have had this summer, the winds and swell broke and we spent our window waiting for it to clear. On the last couple of days, the CSPA told us that the weather was getting worse and we would have to look for a date in September, perhaps even next year.”

Devastated by the disappointment after more than a year of training to swim the 21 miles to France, the team packed their bags and left Dover.

A reprieve came unexpectedly. “As we arrived home we got a call for a small window, but it was going to be rough.” The ‘window’ started at 11pm, which meant the team faced the additional challenge of swimming at night.

“We returned to Dover and went for it. And rough it was. We started the swim at midnight from Shakespeare Beach, and the initial hours in the dark were against fairly strong swell. The waves did calm a little as the sun rose and we started making good time. Our pilot got us to within metres of Cap Gris Nez and we finished in 13 hours and 3 minutes.”

They had successfully negotiated the world’s busiest shipping route – among ferries, container ships and tankers – swimming against tides and in cold water without wet suits.

The team, comprising Piers, Sarah Dunsbee, Tim Dunsbee, Cara Saunders, Anna Lord and Jack Overtoon, was named Hayley’s Channel Relay Team. “I have known the Dunsbee family for a long time through water polo,” says Piers. “Tim and Sarah are both water polo coaches. One of their twin daughters, Hayley, is severely autistic and lives in a home which is run by Autism East Midlands (a leading autism charity), which is why we swam to raise money for that cause.”

Currently Managing Director of the Podium Performance Group – a consultancy that supports organisations, teams and individuals to develop optimised performance – Piers has also led and advised a range of Olympic and Paralympic sports.

He is the founder of GuruBox, a video-coaching platform that shares ideas and experience in less than a minute, and co-founder of the Sports Influencers (SP.IN) sports business network. Piers is Chair of UK Deaf Sport, a Director/Trustee on several Boards and Performance Advisor to various sports and performance programmes. He is also a member of the Panel of Arbitrators and Mediators for Sports Resolutions UK and the Institute of Directors (IoD) Cheshire Committee.
He is a keynote speaker and guest lecturer and sits on the Sports Advisory Board of Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

Piers has a Masters degree and an MBA from Manchester University and is currently undertaking a PhD in Psychology.

Old Elizabethan Robert ‘Judge’ Rinder experienced an emotional journey to the Nazi concentration camp where his grandfather, Morris Malenicky, was imprisoned in this week’s episode of the BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?

Polish-born Morris lost seven relatives – his parents, four sisters and a brother – in the Treblinka Camp in Poland in 1940 and he was the only one of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust.

In 1942, he had to register the deaths. The certificate, which is shown to Robert (pictured above at his Bar Mitzvah with his grandfather), reads: “Malenicky. Place of birth: Piotrkow, Poland. Circumstances of death: Four sisters, a brother, parents, Treblinka Camp. Gas chambers, crematorium.”

At this point in the programme, Robert (OE 1989–1994) says: “Imagine writing that, how your four sisters, your brother and your parents were wiped out.”

In an interview with the TV Times, Robert explained why he wanted to take part in the programme: “So many of us are interested in understanding where we came from and I only had an outline that I wanted coloured in. But it’s also important that we all understand more about the Holocaust.”

Morris, who was a teenager at the time, escaped the fate of his family only because he was deemed strong enough for work: he was put into forced labour at a glass factory in Piotrkow, his home town. Later, he was sent to the Buchenwald and Schlieben camps in Germany and then to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by the Russian Army three weeks after his arrival.

After the war, he was brought to the UK by a Jewish charity, the Central British Fund. He later met and married Lottie, Robert’s grandmother. Morris died in London in 2001 at the age of 78.

During the programme, Robert is shown the house where Morris grew up in Piortrkow, the ruins of the glass factory, the Buchenwald camp and its sub-camp, Schlieben. At Schlieben, he meets one of his grandfather’s friends, Ben Helfgott, who tells him about the starvation they suffered there,

He told the TV Times: “…there was a biting cold and I imagined my grandfather there in ragged clothing. I met up with my grandfather’s friend, Ben, who had been with him there. The most powerful moment was when Ben said to me, ‘Let’s walk out of here together’. That changed my life.”

Robert is also seen visiting Lake Windermere, where Morris arrived, and watches footage of the orphans’ journey to England. “As I approach Windermere, I imagine what my grandfather would have felt coming from the dankness and greyness of Schlieben into this – big sky, and green, verdant English loveliness.”

Robert said he had spent a great deal of time with his grandfather, yet he had never really told the family what had happened. “…The Holocaust was an unforgettable shadow in the family as my grandfather would behave in eccentric and challenging ways because of what he’d been through.”

Overall, Robert described the experience of making the programme as “an amazing gift. They’d just been statistics before but I read details of how his siblings were good at school and that they loved performing and that breathed life into these young children for me.”

He told the TV Times that his plans for the coming months include more episodes of Judge Rinder and of the Crime Stories programme and, perhaps, a chat show as well.

Equipped only with card and drinking straws, Year 10 boys had to be constructively creative during an architecture event held as part of QE’s Enrichment Week.

For the challenge run by the Art department, House teams were asked to make an architectural structure made up of modular forms, with a theme of Folded Architecture.

Two of 2017’s Year 13 leavers, Nabil Haque and Tochi Onuora, who are both studying Architecture at Cambridge, came back to help.

Towards the end of the day, the participants were instructed to consider what purpose or building form their structure could fulfil. (They had not been told they were making buildings earlier in the day, so that their thinking would not be constrained by notions of what they considered to be normal for buildings.)

With function therefore following form, the six-strong teams decided that what they had designed could be put to use for buildings as diverse as stadia, hospitals, safari lodges and residential accommodation, to name but a few.

The pieces were judged at the end of the event. The Stapylton House team – comprising Alex Aliev, Nikhil Gulshan, Rakul Maheswaran, Jack Runchman, Aqif Choudhury, Riaz Kalim and Jude Miranda – won overall. Their contribution was praised for the way that it essentially used the same hexagonal shape repeatedly to build up the structure and create something very stable, yet still architecturally interesting.

Head of Art Stephen Buckeridge reported that the two visiting Old Elizabethans were very complimentary about the boys’ innovation, lateral thinking and openness to exploring new ways of thinking. He added that the models looked very professional, considering the time spent and rudimentary nature of the materials used. In fact, so good were the models that a small exhibition was staged to give other staff a chance to see them.

Headmaster Neil Enright evoked Nelson Mandela as he urged QE’s young prize-winners to embrace both optimism and persistence.

Mr Enright congratulated the award-winners and explained how they could learn from the former South African President and 1993 Nobel Peace Prize-winner, speaking on what would have been his 100th birthday.

Almost 120 prizes were awarded at the 2018 Junior Awards Ceremony to boys from Years 7–9 across a broad range of categories that included not only academic subjects, but also House prizes and awards for sport, the performing arts and service.

The Headmaster pointed out that the boys receiving awards had achieved double success, firstly by securing a place at the School (more than 2,400 boys sat last year’s entrance examination) and then by winning a prize. “You have been the best of the best in your year groups for the respective subjects, extra-curricular activities and contributions to school life for which prizes are being given. You should therefore be very proud of what you have achieved,” he said.

Just as Mr Mandela had spoken of “keeping one’s head pointed towards the sun, one’s feet moving forwards”, the boys should “keep taking those forward steps” and should also be “highly, but realistically, ambitious”.

Warning pupils against “complacency and hubris”, Mr Enright added: “Being humble, modest and grounded – when coupled with hard work and an inner confidence – is a safe pathway to success, and these are characteristics happily common among QE boys.” And he alluded to Nelson’s Mandela’s axiom that “a good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination”.

The guest speaker at the afternoon ceremony in the School Hall was Old Elizabethan Daniel Isenberg (1999–2006), a young barrister who studied at Cambridge and Harvard and was also Judicial Assistant to Lord Sumption and Lord Carnwath at the Supreme Court.

Other VIP guests included Chairman of Governors Barrie Martin MBE and the Mayor of the Borough of Barnet, Councillor Reuben Thompstone.

The ceremony was enhanced by music performed by the boys, including three pieces from British composers – Samba Triste from Three Piece Suite by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Promenade from Le Tombeau de Couperin by John McLeod and Hypnosis by Ian Clarke.

The final vote of thanks was given by Ugan Pretheshan, winner of the Year 7 Public Speaking Award.

Afterwards, boys and their parents enjoyed refreshments with the Headmaster, staff and guests.

Old Elizabethan Kam Taj returned to the School to lead a workshop on Oxbridge preparation for 32 sixth-formers.

Kam, a performance coach and motivational speaker, who himself studied at Churchill College, Cambridge, covered topics ranging from university interviews to procrastination in the all-day session.

The course was part of the extensive programme QE provides to support senior boys as they make university applications and consider career choices that best match their talents and aptitudes. Applications to Oxford and Cambridge must be made by 15 October for places starting the following autumn. QE boys secured 144 places at the two universities in the five years from 2013 to 2017.

Afterwards, Kam (Kamran Tajbaksh, OE 2004–2011) praised his Year 12 audience who had “stayed engaged and receptive for the duration of the course”, even though, as he pointed out, they had just completed their examinations and were looking forward to the start of the summer holidays in just a few days’ time.

While at QE, Kam achieved 13 A* grades at GCSE and four A*s with one A at A-level. On graduating with a first in Manufacturing Engineering, Kam initially took up a post as a management consultant with a global company. However, he had begun doing performance coaching work while still at university: “It was far more fulfilling than academics (even more so than my sports!) – and my clients were achieving great results.”

So, in 2016, he “left the strategy consulting world and began living my dream for myself”.
He recently published his first book 8 Principles of Exam Domination, which aims to help pupils achieve their desired grades with minimal stress.

His talk covered topics entitled:

• Acing uni interviews
• Overcoming procrastination
• Planning & prioritisation
• Mindset management

Kam also introduced a new topic, with the QE boys the first to hear about his Motivational Fire Formula.

Afterwards, Kam thanked the School from his Instagram account and wished all the boys a “great summer” and hoped they would “come back refreshed and ready to smash Year 13!”