The 2022–2023 academic year has come to an end in Cambodia, where children attend school from mid-November to the end of September. We are happy to report that Little Hearts students have once again delivered outstanding results. It wasn’t easy, though. These positive academic outcomes were the fruit of much hard work on the part of the kids as well as their tutors and caretakers, and of our longstanding focus on education – as soon as children join our community, their educational level is assessed and they are given all the tools to catch up and succeed in school, including enrolment in a private school, tutoring if necessary, supervision of homework, afternoon English classes, computing lessons, and so forth.
We start the review of results with our oldest resident, Sarim, who just completed his bachelor’s degree in marketing at the National University of Management. His senior thesis was a group project analysing the marketing efforts of Cambodia’s leading retail bank, Advanced Bank of Asia. The group, led by Sarim, achieved an impressive 93.5% grade for their work, the highest in the class. Congratulations, Sarim, on a stellar university career and on obtaining your degree. What’s next?
Ilay, who is studying interior design at the Royal University of Fine Arts, completed her third year with a GPA of 3.47. Not content with that excellent achievement, she plans to use the upcoming academic break to enrol in a computing course to learn how to use computer-aided design (CAD) software – a fundamental skill for anyone engaging in a design profession.
Jack, as you may remember, recently started a degree course in business communications at Pannasastra University. He is now in his second term there, and very busy with the foundation year’s demanding class schedule. It’s a frenzied life, he says, with at least three hours of lectures per day in cultural anthropology, gender studies, academic English and political science.
Moving on to our secondary school students, we have two fresh high school graduates: congratulations to Elizabeth and Sarem (Sarim’s younger brother) for completing Grade 12. But their work is not done yet – they must buckle down now and prepare for the national baccalaureate exam scheduled in November. These two highly dedicated students are determined to pass with flying colours. To get in the right frame of mind, Sarem keeps repeating his favourite mantra, ‘Great achievement is born of great sacrifice’, so we all know what’s in store for them over the next two months…
Six kids (Olivia, Michael, Noah, Dalin, Micky and Daleine) completed Grade 11 and are looking forward – not without some trepidation – to being seniors in the next academic year. Their older siblings have warned them of the demands of the final year of school, so they are both excited and anxious to be in Grade 12 and to prepare for the transition to university. But they are up for the challenge.
In middle and primary school, all our children are doing well at the Mahasastra School. They all have overall grades in the 70–90% range. Lisa and Naomi continue to lead the way, effortlessly maintaining their high ranking. A number of the elementary kids are doing so well that the school has proposed that they skip a year, advancing by two levels instead of one when the new school year begins.