INTERNATIONAL human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson gained hero status from students at her former school yesterday.
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As the Rhodes Scholar urged students at Bomaderry High School to follow their dreams and aim high, she became a person several students said they wanted to emulate.
“As she was talking about working with her role models she was becoming one of mine,” said legal studies student Andrew Hanson.
He said Ms Robinson was an inspiration in the way she had come through the school to achieve such excellence and earn a place on the world stage for her work on WikiLeaks and other cases.
While she detailed some of her high-profile work, Ms Robinson spent time recounting her days at Bomaderry High School, including being in the principal’s office for wagging school.
“We all do silly things when we are young, but it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed and it doesn’t mean you can’t be great at whatever you put your mind to,” she said.
While she had always aimed high, there were those who did not have a lot of faith in her ability, Ms Robinson revealed.
For most of her time at high school she wanted to become a doctor, but was told by a teacher she was not smart enough.
“I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class, or wasn’t considered to be the smartest kid in the class,” she revealed.
It was not until year 12 that she started excelling and had hopes of studying medicine, but late in the year had to make a sudden change to her priorities after failing a psychiatric evaluation that was a prerequisite for medicine.
In the void left by losing the medical dream Ms Robinson said she focused on her passion for Indonesian, and at her mother’s insistence used her UAI of 98.3 to couple it with law in studies at Australian National University.
In her first couple of years at uni “I did way too much partying, I did way too much sport”. She said she didn’t begin to achieve her potential until she decided to spend a year in Indonesia as part of her studies.
In West Papua she saw the way the Indonesian military was killing and torturing people arguing for independence. “That’s when I realised I wanted to be a human rights lawyer,” she said.
She hoped to work for the United Nations but was told to achieve that, she should complete a Masters degree overseas, which her family could not afford.
A scholarship was the obvious answer but “I still didn’t think I was smart enough”, even after her final two years yielded straight high distinctions.
She said she was fortunate the Rhodes Scholarship looked at things including sporting and community achievements, and urged the students to think about options available to them.
“It’s difficult to imagine the possibilities that are open to you,” she said, however she aimed to inspire that imagination by starting a Rhodes prize – an annual award presented to a student at the school best displaying the qualities espoused by the Rhodes Scholarship.
