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AKibombo, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The noise died down in the room, giving way to silence. Dr. McInerney, the Dean of Studies at Campion College, read out the names of students who had excelled academically. Elizabeth Boerdam walked up and received a certificate, surrounded by the applause of friends, fellow-students, and lecturers. Elizabeth achieved a weighted average mark of high distinction, and the highest grade of the first year class. She qualified for an academic excellence scholarship, and was also awarded the “The Lord is Our Shepherd” book grant. Today, she joins Oceania CHS to talk about how being homeschooled helped her to succeed at Campion.
Elizabeth was homeschooled all her life, and says:
I definitely think it helped me. The main way it did was helping me manage my own time. Because in university it’s different from school, in that at school, you have your teacher there to constantly remind you when things are due, what you ought to be studying, what your answers to questions ought to be… in university your professors will give you your assignments at the beginning of the semester…and its up to you to form your own relationship with the material so that you get those assignments done on time and you’re prepared for all your exams. Homeschooling was very much the same for me.
She also highlighted how “Homeschooling gave me the opportunity to study what I am genuinely interested in and good at.” Elizabeth has always loved books, and talks about when she read the hobbit at age eleven and “fell in love with Tolkien’s writings.” In a book, you encounter “a world that is different from your own, but the lessons that you learn in that book and the reality it presents, it always translates back to the reality which you live in.”
To attend Campion, Elizabeth moved from her Brisbane home to NSW. She said “it was a very big adjustment…you get homesick…but at the same time, it was such a rewarding experience, because you learn so much about yourself, you learn how resilient you are.” About studying there, she said “I liked all of it.” She mentions enjoying tutorial discussions, both when others agreed with her and when they disagreed, because then she got “to have a really fun conversation about why you disagree.” She said “history had never been my favorite subject [but] I was finally about to see that history was so much more than just dates, and battles, and boring people that lives thousands of years ago. It was this amazing story of people in different times, with different cultures, and how that has affected the way we see the world today.” She also enjoyed reading the Iliad, the Aeniad, and Aeschylus, and studying metaphysics.
She says, “I think that both homeschooling and Campion have definitely helped my Faith journey…homeschooling really gave me a very solid basis, where I was really just surrounded by that which is good and true and beautiful.” Through being homeschooled, she was able to become firmly grounded in her Faith. Later, when others disagreed with her or became frustrated, “it was never something that made me question my Faith” At Campion, she loved being so close to a Chapel that “Our Lord was always just a flight of stairs away from me.”
Elizabeth gave a study tip: “Write it out. Find yourself a planner, find yourself a timetable,” so that you know “what exactly you need to have done.” She recommends “being very clear on what exactly the exam or the essay is going to be like, what criteria you need to meet” in order to avoid spending time studying what you don’t need to, or missing important material. She says “procrastination is the enemy.” Often, if she feels like she can’t study she’ll go for a walk beforehand, and she will take breaks. She says, “don’t just sit in your room and study without giving yourself the rest you need, but also don’t just have a good time and forget about the study side of uni life.”
Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/In3MTjKDHcE