Ready For The World | Alexander Monro (CGS 2024)

For me, life can be summed up with one word: light. All my experiences and thoughts in growing up to become an adult are reflections and glimmers of the new and changed. And whilst light can be harsh and unwelcoming at times, it is fundamental to growing and maturing. My 18 years of life have been a blur of emotion, splashed with deep, velvet colours of music, academic achievement, and personal growth, all of which have intricately prepared me for the complexities and challenges of the world.

I love music, as it is a medium in which I can feel like I can express myself in creative ways. However, I haven’t always felt this way. When I was a small child, music, while an integral part of my life, felt like a chore. We had a saying in my house, “You only eat the days you practice”, which looking back may have resulted in my parents being on the awkward side of a few conversations, but in essence, it was not just a fun quip about practising every day to get better, but instead an invocation to how constant dedication to something, just like music becomes as sustaining and necessary to my life as food. My musical journey, fatigued and pushed at the start before I understood diligence, has pushed me far. Last year, I auditioned for the 2024 Australian Youth Orchestra, a nationally recognised music programme that hosts outstanding performance and professional development camps for young musicians. I auditioned on both viola and harp, placing in the top 10 best violists under 23 and the best harpist under 18 throughout Australia. I was placed on the reserve list for the flagship touring orchestra for anyone 25 and under on both instruments. I participated in two camps of this programme last year; however, the 2024 National Music Camp was much more invigorating and enjoyable because I placed a lot higher. Being held to a higher standard is like carefully walking across a fast-spinning disk of non-uniform density. The anticipation and trepidation of needing to live up to what you think you lack precipitates wild misjudgements of the angular velocity of social expectations, yet the unexpected acceleration of intense passion is almost divine. National Music Camp has pushed me to seek fortitude in dedication and strengthen my sense of character and resilience. Surrounded by peers who shared my fervour, I was thrust into an environment that demanded both individual excellence and a collaborative understanding of what music means to us. This is why my 2024 goal was to audition even better so that I could get into the flagship orchestra for the first time, and if I am very lucky indeed, get into the 2025 international Europe tour, which is very improbable; but unfulfilled dreams only hurt when it turns into addiction. Music helps me to love social relationships, even in those times when I get overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of the interconnected world. In this way, music shapes my personality into being ready for the world at large.

In parallel to my extensive commitment to music, my time at Canberra Grammar School has been decorated by crafting my acutely self-aware propensity to overthink into slightly more organised glimmers of cognition. I chose my subjects for Year 12 to be hard, not because I felt like I needed to live up to my overachieving older brother, but truly because I like to challenge myself and learn. And whilst I have not excelled in all my subjects how I would like, with very noticeable variation, I have managed to find out what I love. I love Physics and Mathematics just as much as love Music. The inductive nature of the scientific method to build up human awareness of our fragile existence is truly spectacular. To enrich my learning outside of school, I take ANU Extension Physics, a course covering almost all first-semester physics during the first year of university. This course allowed me to make new friends and discover my love for physics. As this course stretches my understanding and especially my imagination in maintaining mathematical empiricism, I find it more fun than School physics, outperforming my School scores by a significant margin. It is in the intellectually challenging purist of questioning the fundamental nature of the human condition that I find solace. This is why in 2023 I was awarded the Year 11 IB Philosophy award, along with the music award and the CAS project award, as I can weaponise my nature to vastly overthink everything to learn and question everything to find what is valuable to me. In this way, my academics have pushed me to be creative in approaching life both strategically and socially to become a better person who is ready for the world.