Vigorous challenges and great rewards

When Redhill matriculant Joshua Brooking chose to take the rigorous International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme route to matriculation, he did it because he wanted to challenge himself academically and believed it would give him a better chance at getting into an overseas university.

“I wanted to extend myself,” he said. “Before IB, classes felt like just ticking off a list, and I found academic extension only outside of school.” And though Brooking received 42 out of a possible 45 points for his IB Diploma, the top mark of his IB cohort, he says, “There was a greater workload than I had ever previously had to deal with or expect, and for the first time, I really had to work hard at academics.

“There were times when deadlines came up and I just wasn’t able to meet them, which isn’t something I had ever dealt with before. The first time that happened, I got stressed. You start to panic about whether you can achieve everything you wanted to achieve if you can’t complete these deadlines within the year.”

He said of the two-year international programme, “I had to acknowledge that there are difficult patches, and you can always grow from them. And eventually, these experiences helped me to plan more efficiently and prepared me to handle the stress of finals, and hopefully for university as well.”

Brooking enjoyed the more independent approach the IB takes to learning, such as the internal assessments, which are research tasks for each subject. “I started doing research on my own for large essays, which was a new and slightly daunting experience. Having to write a research paper with very little guidance and set structure taught me to think more creatively and be more methodical in my processes. And this also prepares you for projects you must complete for university.

“On top of that, I found the Theory of Knowledge links in the rest of my subjects really interesting,” he said. “You’re sort of forced to connect the subject content to ways of thinking and ways of learning. I found that having to understand the philosophy of how you’re learning the information while trying to learn all the content itself made me appreciate and understand the information better than when I was just memorising things. The act of thinking about the processes, how you’re receiving the information, and how it’s conveyed to you opened a new way of thinking for me and helped me to connect all the things I had learnt in a meaningful way.”

Brooking also excelled in the arts, sports, and student leadership, having been elected head of judiciary on the student council for 2022/2023. In this role, he had to handle conflicts either between students or between students and teachers, usually dealing with issues concerning discrimination or unfairness.

“Our job was to meet students either to mediate and help them solve the conflict together, or to meet separately and help educate those who may be making offensive comments or raise these issues with teachers or the board, if necessary,” said Brooking. “Our goal was to solve these conflicts and ensure that everyone felt safe and that they learnt from the incidents.”

He played guitar in Redhill’s rock band, performing a lead role in the school’s major production in his Grade 11 year, and playing hockey throughout high school.

“Hockey was something I didn’t excel in at first. I was a very weak player at the beginning of Grade 8, but I really enjoyed it, so I put a lot of time into it,” Brooking said. By the end of high school, he was vice-captain of the hockey team in addition to playing for a club.

“Becoming vice-captain was a big achievement for me, and it made all the work feel worthwhile. It was a defining moment of my school career because it illustrated the value of hard work. It also provided a different area to academics, which has always been my strong suit and where I’ve thrived. It showed me that I wasn’t just confined to academics, which was good for me.”

Brooking plans to study engineering, however he has yet to decide whether he will be studying at a local or overseas university.