QE Sixth-Former Makoto Takahashi has won first prize in a national essay competition run by the Royal Geographical Society.
Makoto won the David W Smith Memorial Prize and a £100 cash award, while fellow QE pupil Chon Kemp was one of only three entrants nationwide whose essays were ‘highly commended’ in the contest.
Makoto and Chon both have offers from Oxbridge colleges to read Geography from October; Makoto at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Chon at Jesus College, Oxford. Makoto was also the Green Party candidate in QE’s mock election earlier this month.
The competition involved writing an essay of up to 1,500 words on the subject ‘To what extent are cities in the developing world working towards the goal of sustainable development?’ All Year 13 geographers at QE entered the competition.
The annual competition run by the Developing Areas Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society is named after David W Smith, who also published under the name of David Drakakis Smith. He was an outstanding scholar committed to researching on Third World cities. He died in 1999.