From Nayland to Cambridge

BY GEOFF COLLETT

For Nelson environmentalist Guy Salmon, a simple detail speaks volumes about his youngest son Kinley's way to success. Ever the all-rounder, Kinley used to have the email address "intoeverything@yahoo" (or whoever the service provider was). It summed up as neatly as anything the youngster's philosophy on life.

"He took pride in that – if there was an opportunity for anything to come up, he would volunteer or put himself forward," Guy Salmon says.

To his mind, that all-round enthusiasm has been a crucial element in his son's latest accomplishment: his stellar academic performance at one of the world's most prestigious universities.

Kinley, 21, graduated last year with a BA with first-class honours as the top politics student for his year at Cambridge University, and the third-ranked student in Cambridge's wider social and political sciences school.

After his high-achieving years at Nayland College, it seems a safe bet that it is only the beginning of a lifetime of noteworthy achievement.

Given his background, it is perhaps no surprise he has done so well. His parents, Guy Salmon and Gwenny Davis, brought intellectual stimulation and encouragement to his home life.

He threw himself into sport, culture, drama, debating, friendships. And Mr Salmon says Kinley had a sense of moral concern from an early age.

Academically gifted, he completed his secondary schooling at Nayland in four years, after being moved forward a year, and left high school at 16, in 2004, as the school's second-top student.

He decided he was too young for university, so travelled to Spain for much of 2005, attending school and honing the correspondence learning he had been taking in Spanish.

While there, he turned his mind to where he might go next, and – at the urging of a friend, Lewis Bollard – started thinking about doing tertiary study outside New Zealand.

He explored the options and found an array of opportunities, including offers of places at American Ivy League schools.

Ultimately, he settled on Cambridge, securing the Douglas Myers Scholarship, which pays for a single young New Zealander each year to study at Myers' old college, Gonville and Caius.

Explaining his decision to seek a place at such an esteemed institution, he says that "I think I always had been pretty aspirational or ambitious, if you like.

"I guess I've had a few experiences that felt like, 'why not give it a try'," he says on the phone from Coromandel, where he is enjoying the final day of a summer holiday before flying back to a snow-bound England.

"But it was particularly talking with Lewis Bollard, who went to Harvard in the end, and thinking, 'what's Lewis' background, and would this be possible?"'

Kinley's academic focus at Cambridge demonstrates his career aspirations in international development. He concentrated particularly on conflict and development, and relationships between the two; on the rise of China and Southeast Asia; and international climate change negotiations.

"That's probably where my core interest lies, the nexus between climate change, development and conflict."

Study and extracurricular opportunities at Cambridge sent him to places as varied as Ecuador and Uganda (for aid/development projects), and Poznan in Poland, where he interviewed delegates at the 2008 UN climate change conference for his final dissertation.

He is currently supplementing his BA with a postgraduate diploma in economics. As his father puts it, "he's realised that if he's going to help people in developing countries, he has to have economics", and Kinley admits the diploma is hard going.

"It's very mathematical; it's proven very challenging ... I came back to Nelson [on holiday] and had one of my old teachers from Nayland help out with some of the maths, which was very kind of him."

Once he has completed that, he will be finished with academic life for the meantime. He is hoping to get work in Britain in strategy consulting, to get some "real-world experience".

He gives much credit to his Nayland years for his achievements since – to the quality of teaching, the support and encouragement he had from his teachers, and the wider opportunities he had there to pursue other interests. His parents, too, were "tremendous" influences, hugely supportive but letting him set his own goals.

He admits that the rarefied academic world he has ended up in occasionally seems unreal.

"I certainly wake up fairly regularly feeling a bit surprised and certainly sometimes, certain events or something happens and I think, crikey, this is quite bizarre, I never thought I'd be here."

His father has no doubt that his son's well-rounded approach to life has been the crucial ingredient. "If you're just on one track all the time, sometimes it's a bit hard to stay applied to it, but when you've got a whole lot of other activities and interests woven in with it, then the grind of studying long hours seems more manageable."

He points out, too, that Kinley comes from a strongly academic background – his grandfather, John Salmon, was a noted professor in natural sciences, while Guy's own work has a strong and respected research component. "So it kind of runs in the family."

"But on the other hand, he's done exceptionally well and he's probably going to be rather more noted than me or my father."

High Achievers is a weekly feature about somebody who has done well. If you know somebody who should be profiled, contact geoffc@nelsonmail.co.nz.

- © Fairfax NZ News