Six Times Malaysian Students Made Us Proud In 2019
Although we’ve been complaining about how successful young people have been continuously making us feel bad this past year, we thought that as we approach the end of the year and are feeling all these jolly good vibes, we might take a moment to celebrate them for a change.
This past year, Malaysian students have made headlines for a variety of reasons. But for this article, we decided to focus on the students who made Malaysia proud in their own right.
Andrew Nge Jing Shuen, 17, Beaconhouse Sri Inai International School
Andrew, who is also the youngest person on our list, made headlines when he managed to score the highest standard mark in the world for mathematics and additional mathematics in his International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGSCE) exams.
This resulted in the young teen being named the top in the world for those subjects even before graduating from highschool!
Siti Nurafaf Ismail, 21, University Malaya
Siti Nurafaf made Malaysians proud when she became the winner of the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship.
The win meant that Siti Nurafaf beat out thousands of architecture students to secure herself £7,000 (~RM36,000) grant to research disaster relief architecture.
This win also made her the first Asian woman to hold the title since the scholarship began in 2006.
Danial Faiz Mokhtar, 18, Kolej Matrikulasi Kejuruteraan Pahang
Danial, who had just started college at the time, went viral on Twitter in July after creating an automatic RFID lock system for his dorm room door.
Malaysians everywhere were super impressed with this young man’s applied engineering prowess, including Education Minister, Maszlee Malik.
Jerome Emmanuel and his groupmates, 20, Politeknik Kuching Sarawak
Petrochemical engineering student Jerome, together with his final year project group mates, Nur Syafiqah, Nur Mastiqah, Ros Amirah, and Fakhrul Azeem went viral for doing their part to save the environment.
Concerned about the rising problem of plastic waste, they decided to create an eco-friendly brick.
Sharing their work-in-progress on Twitter, they made headlines when they reported that they had created a prototype made up of 1.3kg worth of recycled PET plastic bottles.
Wan Amiruddin Wan Amran and Adeeb Aideen Mat Yusof, 19, Kolej Vokasional Bachok
Aiming to help reduce the frequency of motorbike thefts, Wan Amiruddin and Adeeb Aideen created a Fingerprint Bike Starter for their final year project.
The Diploma in Electronic Technology students built the system using open-source Arduino software and included a voice-recording system, a liquid crystal display (LCD), and a fingerprint scanner shipped all the way from overseas.
Nurul Ezzaty Hasbullah, 23, Ivy League University of Pennsylvania
(Credit: Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania)
This young Malaysian woman impressed the country when she was awarded the prestigious 2020 Rhodes Scholarship to continue her studies at the University of Oxford in the UK.
Currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in health and societies and minoring in anthropology, Nurul Ezzaty hopes to one day be able to ensure that all children in Malaysia have equal access to quality education regardless of their geography or socioeconomic background.
Congratulations to all these amazing youths! We can’t wait to see what else our talented young Malaysians can achieve in the new year!
Did we miss any other youths that made us proud this year? Share your stories with us on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
