South Waikato Mayoral Scholarship awarded
Mayor Jenny Shattock was proud to announce the recipients of the two Mayoral Scholarships at the schools' respective prize-giving ceremonies held recently.
Congratulations to Sophie Meszaros of Putāruru College and Holly Christison of St Peter's School who were the successful candidates.
Miss Meszaros and Miss Christison were each awarded a $10,000 scholarship, payable at $2,500 per year for a maximum of four years, depending on their course of study.
"We received eleven applications this year from exceptional students of South Waikato families," said Mayor Shattock. "Every year I say the same thing - deciding which students to award these scholarships too is one of the toughest job I have to do as Mayor."
Applicants indicated interest in a range of degrees such as medicine, agricultural science, management, engineering, law, science, software engineering and the arts. Six students were shortlisted and interviewed by the interview panel of Mayor Shattock, Deputy Mayor Jeff Gash, Council's Human Resources Manager Christine Beach and Gateway Coordinator Diane Collins.
"It is always one of the best days at the office when we get to interview such fantastic young people," said Mayor Shattock. "The students all displayed such confidence, determination and ability."
"Special congratulations to Sophie and Holly; you interviewed exceptionally well, have all the credentials; and will surely do yourselves, your school, your Council and your district proud.
If the calibre of these young people is anything to go by, we can all rest easy that our future is in extremely capable hands," concluded Mayor Shattock.
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Background
As far back as 2005 Council has supported youth into training through the South Waikato Trades Training Centre and in later years, the Distribution and Logistics Training Hub. Around the same time Neil Sinclair, who was Mayor at the time, started talking about other ways that we could offer more support youth into education opportunities. From these discussions the Mayoral Scholarship was born. And in 2006, we awarded the first ever four year Mayoral Scholarship to Lee Kuizinas from Tokoroa High School. Lee went on to achieve a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours.
In 2010 Council resolved to award a Mayoral Scholarship each year so that at any one time we had three or four students working through their respective field of study. Since 2006, twelve young people have received Mayoral Scholarships from Council.
Over the years, 139 students have applied for the Mayor Scholarships and the Mayoral Scholarship Committee has had the pleasure of interviewing 47 outstanding young people.
"I have been involved in this process from the start and I have to say every single young person has completely blown the Committee away. Interviewing the top achieving students from our district has been exceptionally rewarding," said Mayor Jenny Shattock. "We have used a number of words to describe these candidates over the years. Words like confident, eloquent, smart, kind, driven, capable, active, community-minded, caring I could go on and on"
