Zach Macaskill-Smith, whose original film ‘The Case’ raised $2000 for charity this year, has won St Peter’s Cambridge’s International Baccalaureate (IB) dux award.
Dux & Proxime 2024 – – Keana Woodfield (right), photographed at St Peter’s Cambridge with (from left) duxes Zach Macaskill-Smith and Gabrielle Hill and (second from right) proxime accessit Tim Qian. Photo – supplied.
The IB Diploma is an NCEA alternative, allowing students to achieve an “esteemed international qualification that fosters the development of the whole person”.
Zach won the Colleen Eager Award for English literature at senior prizegiving, and was top of IB physics, chemistry, geography, English and Spanish.
Acting head of school Julie Small described him as one of the most outstanding students she had come across in her career.
“Zach is a young man who’s got huge insight into people, and a significant emotional intelligence alongside this lovely, kind manner, which is very humble,” she said.
“He has involved himself in the full life of everything that’s on offer, despite being an international baccalaureate student, which already is a mean feat of its own.”
Zach, who has lived just outside Hamilton all his life, juggled his studies this year while directing and producing The Chase, a 52-minute murder mystery film shot in and around Cambridge.
Zach Macaskill-Smith
The 18-year-old co-wrote the screenplay with friend Emma Gray, telling the story of a detective who stumbles across a time machine while investigating a murder case.
“It was a lot of work, and very much a challenge about bringing people together to achieve a sheer creative vision,” he said.
About 40 students worked on the movie, which screened locally in August, attracting more than 200 viewers and raising $2000 for Cure Kids Cancer Foundation and Women’s Refuge.
Zach was head boy of Swears House this year. He represented St Peter’s at the Model United National Youth Conference and the New Zealand Engineering Science Competition.
Currently applying for scholarships to universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, he would love to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England.
“I’m looking at different options,” he said.
“I don’t have a favourite subject – I like different aspects of all of them. I feel like maths is a good fit for studying at Cambridge – it’s general in a way but specialist at the same time. It’s useful in so many fields; it doesn’t pigeonhole you into doing one specific thing, like medicine or engineering.”
Asked how he had managed to achieve so much in one year, Zach said the secret was to “strive for really aspirational things”.
“And some things people will say you can’t do, like making a film…they might say it’s not realistic and it might not all turn out okay…but through that act of stretching yourself you can really go beyond where you might think you’d be able to,” he said.
St Peter’s International Baccalaureate proxime accessit was Tim Qian, a keen table tennis and basketball player who represented St Peter’s at the University of Waikato’s Analytical Chemistry Competition and the New Zealand Engineering Science Competition this year.
NCEA dux was Gabrielle Hill and NCEA proxime accessit was head girl Keana Woodfield.
See: St Peter’s top students.
See: Zach’s timing is dead right.
Zach Mackaskill-Smith IB Dux 2024
