Alicer Cerdeira

Oi pessoal! My name is Alice Cerdeira and I was born and raised in the beautiful lands of Brazil, which I called home until four years ago when I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand. I am a bilingual, bi-cultural nerd who dabbles in a bit of everything and who can often be found working on a crossword or sudoku during any spare time. I was selected to take part in the 13th Asia Science Camp which will be hosted by China at the University of Shantou. It will be a week of listening to Nobel Laureates and some of the top technologists speak, along with cultural excursions and poster competitions! I’ve never been to Asia before so I am unbelievably excited and honoured that I was chosen to represent New Zealand in this international event.

I am currently a Year 13 student at Otumoetai College and take physics, chemistry, geography, statistics and calculus, the latter done through the Canterbury STAR program MATH199. I am in my school’s Mentoring and Visual Arts committees and am currently mentoring a group of year 9’s on a community art project done through the STARS program with the Graeme Dingle Foundation. I also mentor the junior teams at my school’s Robotics Club, where my team and I qualified for the VEX Robotics World Championship twice.

My other passion is music, I play the violin and am a member of the Tauranga Youth Philharmonic and two school music groups.  I enjoy writing as a hobby, and have completed NCEA Spanish up to Scholarship level, which I guess makes me two-and-a-half lingual.

However, of all the subjects I’ve tried out, none have captured my interest in quite the same way as the Sciences. There is something incredibly enthralling about understanding how the world works, probing deeper, and realising that you can’t trust your intuition. Being proven wrong again and again is made to be absolutely rewarding when the outcome is being one step closer to understanding how our universe works, all the tiny forces that shape our everyday lives. Science has also helped me find myself.

I have met so many incredible people and have had so many amazing experiences through delving into science and technology. I have learnt how to work in a team, and the joys of problem-solving together- be it figuring out a particularly tough scholarship calculus question, understanding the mechanics of a flywheel in robotics, or simply trying to figure out what the heck is going on in a physics experiment. Science has truly played a huge part in my life, and getting to attend the ASC is yet another opportunity I am so excited to experience as I continue to pursue a future in this field.