High achievers honoured in Premier’s VCE Awards

VICTORIA’S best performing VCE students have been recognised with Premier’s VCE Awards, celebrating their outstanding efforts and achievements in their final year of schooling amid the challenges of 2020.

Officially announced on Sunday, there were 297 Study Awards presented this year in 90 subjects across the state, with a handful of these going to students in the Geelong region.

One of these is Christian College Geelong graduate Shaun Altmann, who received his award for being one of the top three students last year in Applied Computing: Software Development.

He said he was surprised to learn he had received a Study Award, as he did not know they existed beforehand.

As part of his course requirement to develop and evaluate a software solution that met the needs of a client, Mr Altmann worked with Christian College Geelong itself and its human resources department to deliver a software package with 6,000 lines of code.

“I like the idea that I can make anything – I like to make stuff that’ll do something for me,” he said.

“Instead of writing out something a couple of hundred thousand times, you can just do a program that goes on the web, dumps it and does it all for you.

“I like the idea of making life easier for people, plus it’s fun to make cool stuff.”

Mr Altmann has since landed a part-time job in tech support at Christian College Geelong’s middle school campus in Highton, and said he hoped to pursue his interest in robotics in the future.

“Maybe something in robotics or AI – not quite the Iron Man level, I feel like that might be too far-fetched or unrealistic, but something like that would be really cool.”

The other Study Award winners from the Geelong region are:

• Matthew Rochfort, Belmont High School – English Language
• Indi Ryan, Sacred Heart College Geelong – Health and Human Development
• Tianyi Yang, The Geelong College – Music Performance (VCE VET)
• Isabelle Auld, Sacred Heart College Geelong – Outdoor and Environmental Studies, and
• Lachlan Houen, The Geelong College – Theatre Studies.

The 23 Top All-Round VCE High Achiever awards recognise those students who achieved study scores of 46 or higher out of 50 in at least five VCE subjects, and there were also three Top International Student Awards.

“A massive congratulations to our top-performing 2020 VCE students who worked incredibly hard to achieve these amazing results in their final year of school – I hope you are all so proud of your achievements,” Victorian Education Minister James Merlino said.

“These award winners are a testament to how well Victorian students, teachers and school communities adapted to the challenges of a global pandemic, and still produced outstanding results.”