Year 12 pupil awarded Highly Commended for Philosophy essay
Posted on: March 29th 2023School News
Well done to year 12 pupil Dan who has received a Highly Commended award for his essay submitted for the Northeastern University London Philosophy essay title ‘Can it ever be morally acceptable to sacrifice an innocent person for some greater good? Illustrate your answer with examples.’
Dan commented on his experiences: "Initially, I was very interested by the question, but as I thought about it more, I realised the difficulties surrounding how to effectively answer such a question in 1500 words. Thus, my head in disarray about how to organise a flurry of disjointed ideas. Nonetheless, I tried my best to power through and wrote a first draft. I was not very impressed to say the least, so I sought the help of my RS teacher, Dr Brower Latz, who kindly agreed to help and gave me a lot of possible alternative approaches as well as ways of structuring my arguments in order to be more succinct. After a few more drafts I was ready to send the essay off. Unfortunately, my perfectionism almost stopped me from entering in the end as I decided to have one final read on the day of the deadline. I was distracted in the middle of this, preventing me from submitting the essay as planned. They had been very clear on their website that there would be no exceptions to the submission deadline under any circumstances. The final time for submissions was 1:00 pm and it was 12:40 pm before I had realised that I had not yet submitted my entry, which had me panicked to say the least. I proceeded to my laptop to try and submit the essay, making sure to comply with each of their specific rules for submission (e.g. putting your name at the top of every page, naming the file specifically, making it a pdf), which was when I experienced just about every technological glitch known to man. After vehemently battling slow internet, formatting errors, and other issues that I did not even know existed I was finally able to submit my essay at around 12:55 pm".
Dan added: "I thought little more about it, until, in March, I received the email to inform me that the essay was ‘Highly Commended’, which I was certainly surprised by. Much of the credit must go to Dr Brower Latz as it was his recommendations that helped me to streamline the essay into a more coherent piece of writing."
Well done Dan for your hard work!