PHOTO: OWEN EGAN
Nicola Terceira: Rhodes warrior
Among her ancestors, Nicola Terceira counts an English mutineer and a privateer.
While she and these fellow Bermudans hale from different centuries -- the first, Christopher Carter, the island's first settler, jumped ship in 1600, while Hezekiah Frith arrived with his treasure in the early 19th century -- they share a sense of determination and a love of Bermuda.
What sets Terceira apart from these outlaws, however, is that she's managed to make use of these characteristics within the law, something that has brought her many rewards in life, the most recent of which being a Rhodes Scholarship.
That also means that come next September, she'll cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from her English predecessors, when she settles into Oxford University's Trinity College to do her MSc in epidemiology, evolution and the control of infectious disease.
The first in her immediate family to complete a university degree, the first to have such a thirst for outdoor adventure and the first in her large extended family, of English-Portuguese descent, to go into medical science, Terceira was "very surprised" to be awarded the coveted scholarship.
After a "tough" interview for the scholarship, held last December in Bermuda, Terceira had "no idea" of how she'd done. She learned that evening of her success, left the next day for a family holiday to London and celebrated with them over dinner and champagne.
Terceira, who graduates next month with an honours degree in microbiology and immunology, has been active in many McGill clubs. She has been a singer with the McGill Choral Society, a member of the McGill Outdoors Club and McGill Students for AIDS Education and a tutor for under-privileged children through the McGill Big Buddies Tutoring Service.
She says her parents deserve much of the thanks for her success so far in academia. "They didn't come from much and they worked really hard to give me and my sister many opportunities."
She also credits the recreational organizations to which she belonged while growing up. Through her association with the Girl Guides (as a girl guide, then a leader) and Outward Bound, Terceira gained "a sense of confidence, leadership, commitment and of time-management."
Perseverance too. Terceira credits one experience with Outward Bound in Wales with giving her the toughness to persevere in the most difficult of circumstances.
"It was a 50-mile expedition and my feet were completely raw and bleeding by the end. So many times I felt like giving up, but I had to convince myself and the others to continue.
"Crossing that stile [to complete the course] is the high point of my life," she says. "Now I know that if I can just keep going, I'll come to the end
Thinking back on that time has got me through other difficult situations."
Karen Brassinga, Terceira's technical supervisor for her honours research project in Professor Gregory Marczynski's lab, observed that same perseverance at the bench.
"She spent many hours figuring out what she had to do," notes Brassinga, explaining that "the transition from teaching lab to research lab is a bit of a shock to the system. When it's your first time working in the lab with no instructions from the TA, you have to push yourself to do things."
Brassinga says she is already missing Terceira and her Bermuda stories of going down to the beach to buy fresh fish.
As for Terceira, after completing her studies at Oxford and studying medicine somewhere -- she's deferred her acceptance at McGill -- she plans to return home. "I'm hoping for a position in the department of health," she says, explaining that there's a need for someone to improve communications between the public and private health sectors in Bermuda.
"Many diseases in Bermuda are not managed as effectively as they could be due to a lack of communication between the public and the private health care sectors," says the 21-year-old, illustrating the problem with the matter of asthma. "Asthma has the highest rate of hospitalization, but much of that could be avoided if patients were given nebulizers [the device used to render medication into a spray form] but the insurance companies won't pay the $300. So, people end up in hospital.
"Anyone with the right skill and the right information can affect change," says Terceira who's determined to become just such a person.
Bronwyn Chester
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