Prep student best in the world

By Lindsey Turnbull

Eighteen-year-old Hannah Galbraith, an A-level student at Cayman Prep and High School, has just become the third student from that school to gain top marks in her Travel & Tourism AS exam, making her the best in the world in that subject this year.

She joins Cayman Prep & High School alumni Derricka Neysmith who was the first to achieve top in the world grades in the subject in 2016, followed by Lucas Burke in 2018.

Hannah has recently completed three A-levels in Travel & Tourism, Business and Marine Science and hopes to further her education at university next year.

She gave some background as to why she chose Travel & Tourism as one of her A-level choices.

“Having lived in the Cayman Islands all my life, I have always known about tourism and have first-hand experience of watching our islands evolve into a highly sought-after tourist destination,” she said. “Therefore, the subject came naturally to me and as I learnt more about the principles and tactics used by tourist destinations globally, as well as locally, my passion for the subject grew.”

Hannah acknowledged that the excellent grade was not easy to come by.

“The result did not come without hard work,” she explained. “I spent many hours studying and taking past papers so that there would be no surprises when it came to the actual exam but it definitely helped that I enjoyed what I was studying and could apply what I was learning to Cayman.”

The teachers in the CPHS Travel & Tourism team are the Head of Business Nick Yale and the Travel & Tourism teachers, Lina Gibson and Daniel Baker. Mr Baker, described the overall aptitude of this year’s A-level class:

“We will not know the results for A2 [A-level] until August; however, we were very successful in the AS exam in October 2020 with a 100% A-B success rate from the 13 candidates entered,” he said.

Mr Baker gave some further insight into the Travel & Tourism course.

“The Travel & Tourism subject includes a coursework event where the students must plan, prepare, and deliver a real-life tourism product for paying customers, this helps students develop key transferable skills such as teamworking, innovation and problem solving which ultimately will benefit them as they go on to university and into the workplace,” he explained. “This, along with an interesting curriculum, makes it an exciting subject to study and what better place to study it than here in Grand Cayman.”

Hannah advised that she plans to attend a university in the United States beginning in January 2022, where she hopes she will study Global Business.