By Mr Wright, Academic Partnerships Coordinator

On the evening of Wednesday 22 March, we welcomed 20 Year 12 students from Harrow School to continue to collaborate with their counterparts here at NHEHS.

This event is part of a sequence of meetings and followed a successful afternoon for NHEHS students at Harrow on Thursday 9 March. With the guidance of experts across various fields, from professors at MIT, Harvard and Edinburgh to government Economists, small groups of students at both schools have been preparing presentations for a multidisciplinary symposium that aims to explore different academic questions loosely related to the theme of Love, from medicine to economics and linguistics.

Final presentations will be made on 25 May this year at the Royal Society.

Want to find out more? Students reflect on their research in a short video, and you can find out more about the questions they are working on.

A symposium calls for independent research, curiosity, tenacity, cooperation with peers, learning to ask the right questions of an expert, creativity and taking calculated risks. The process offers an outstanding preparation for university study. Last Wednesday, the portrait room and library at NHEHS were alive with conversation, preconceptions being challenged, persuasion, and the excitement of new ideas and ways of thinking that invariably makes such groups greater than the sum of their parts. Science, arts, language, politics and history were explored as thoroughly as time allowed and it was excellent to witness students beginning to shape the knowledge gained from their weeks of investigation into convincing presentations. One of the aims of this project has been to demonstrate to students that academic study can be fun, sociable, as well as just hard work!

What is Love? If we do not reach definitive conclusions, I am certain that, after 25 May, we will all understand just how complex a question this is.