Congratulations to Jasmine Hanrahan who has been awarded the Westonian scholarship for 2022.

Jasmine started at Te Puna Wai o Waipapa - Hagley College in Year 9. At the recent Senior Prizegiving, she was awarded the Westonian scholarship for 2022. This scholarship is awarded to a student who has attended our kura from Years 9-13 to assist them with their tertiary study. It is funded by the Hagley West Association, a group of past pupils of Christchurch West High School and more recently Hagley High School.

Jasmine has excelled during her five years at Te Puna Wai o Waipapa, as demonstrated by her fine academic record and her numerous tutor awards since Year 9. She has also been a peer support leader over the last two years. Before NCEA exams even started, she had earned enough credits to have passed Level 3 – amazing. Some of the credits she is most excited about are 17 Level 3 credits she earned last year that involved learning how to trap and kill possums! She saw this advertised in our weekly ‘Careerbites’ email, thought it looked and sounded interesting, and so completed the course in a week of the holidays.

Hockey is a really important part of Jasmine’s life. She has played since she was four years old. Amazingly, she hasn’t sustained many injuries playing hockey; in fact she gets more injuries from umpiring, due to the higher workload. Jasmine still plays hockey once a week, but she umpires 4-5 days a week for up to 10 matches, at very high grades of competition. She umpires for both Canterbury and New Zealand Hockey, including umpiring the Under 18 Nationals in Nelson and the NZ Secondary Schools competition in Hawke’s Bay. In all this, she has demonstrated great leadership skills, high levels of personal organisation and responsibility, and a great deal of patience. She also gives back to younger players by overseeing and training up younger umpires.

Another major interest in Jasmine’s life is playing the bag pipes. She is the Pipe Band leader for the Juvenile Caledonian Society Pipe Band. This is a big deal! Jasmine started playing the bagpipes aged 10. Her grandfather had a set of bagpipes that they found out were over 100 years old. They were made in Scotland, include sections of elephant ivory, and they were the exact pipes that were used to pipe out the ships from Lyttelton Harbour during World War II. Jasmine absolutely loves piping, and practicing for competitions, even though it’s a big time commitment. She placed 4th out of 24 pipers in the recent Labour weekend solo competition.

In addition to all this, Jasmine enjoys hiking with her family – they walked the Rakiura Track on Stewart Island over the last holidays. She’s also a great baker – the most legendary cake so far being made up of 130 cupcakes for her dad’s big birthday celebration. The ‘snake’ cake was 2.4 metres long!

In 2023, Jasmine is going to Massey University in Palmerston North. She will study a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Ecology and Conservation, with a minor in Zoology. Her long-term plan is to help animals and the environment.

In thinking back on her time at Hagley, Jasmine says she was quite closed off at the start, because she had her best friend here. Her encouragement to others is to take the time to get to know some other people; be open; make new friends and take up opportunities when they come along.

Congratulations on your many achievements, Jasmine. We look forward to following your career in the future.