An 18-year-old Hungarian student won first place in one of the most famous and well-known Oxford essay contests, with a topic that would teach even experienced humanities students a lesson. Olivér Csákány speaks four languages, last year he won second place in French on OKTV, and recently he teaches French lessons for high school students - for free.
"The upper limit was 4,000 words, which was a big problem, because I always felt that although I had the seeds of chapters that would be very good in a thesis or a dissertation, there is simply no room to expand on the topics here, and I was only scratching the surface. I thought that my essay would not be well received," says Olivér Csákány, a graduate of the László Lovassy High School in Veszprém and a student of the senior program of the Milestone Institute.
He was wrong: this year he won one of the most prestigious Oxford essay competitions, the Mary Renault Prize. Essay competitions for the UK's top universities are particularly popular with British students - there's a website for high school students that lists the competitions with the slogan 'straight path to university' - but it's extremely rare that a student from a British school doesn't win first place .
The Mary Renault competition is announced by St. Hugh's College in Oxford, which has been in operation since 1886, for students aged 16-18. and about the fact that President John F. Kennedy once said that he was his favorite author. Renault was herself a student at St. Hugh's in the 1920s, and the theme of the competition is related to the writer's novels, the culture of classical antiquity and its reception.
"I had to choose a topic from the ancient world, which could be political, historical, philosophical or literary, and its reception had to be investigated. I started working on the essay quite quickly, but since I had read a lot about my topic, I only started writing the text a few weeks before the deadline," says Olivér Csákány, whose essay deals with a topic that would teach not only high school students, but also humanities students :
Theocritus 19-20. deals with its reception in the 19th century in Uranian poetry of the Victorian era, mainly in the sonnet cycle "Echoes from Theocritus" by Edward Cracroft Lefroy. The high school student from Veszprém won the first place, the second place went to a high school student from Singapore, and the third place was shared by two British students.
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