Vincentian Scholar receives prestigious MIT award

Abigail Scott, a 2017 national scholar and top performing female in the 2015 CSEC examinations has secured yet another academic award.

Scott, a Chemistry senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been named the recipient of the 2022 prestigious Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) Senior Academic Award.

This award, according to an article posted on chemistry.mit.edu is presented annually to an outstanding senior woman who has demonstrated the highest level of academic excellence through her course work and related professional activities at MIT.

Scott credits her Chemistry teacher, Juanita Hunte-King in St Vincent and the Grenadines, who first introduced her to chemistry, and fostered her love for the subject.

The article quotes the young scholar saying that “[Hunte-King] encouraged critical thinking instead of rote learning and made learning chemistry quite fun.”

“I distinctly remember her turning our lab session on qualitative analysis into a detective game, making the content more engaging. I think her energy for chemistry sparked my interest, and my fascination with understanding how things work on a molecular level has sustained my interest,” she said.

Scott said she considered majoring in bioengineering when she first started at MIT, one of the best engineering schools in the world.

But when she took the Concourse version of Organic Chemistry, where she was taught by Dr Elizabeth Taylor, it cemented her decision to major in Chemistry.

“I enjoyed figuring out reaction mechanisms and possible synthetic routes, even though I was pretty terrible at doing so at first. They felt like puzzles, and I love solving puzzles,” Abigail said.

Scott, the daughter of Bernard and Dawn Scott of Arnos Vale, graduated from the St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College in 2017 with grade one passes at CAPE in Communication Studies, Caribbean Studies, Biology Unit 1 and 2, Physics Unit 1 and 2 and Pure Mathematics Unit 1 and 2.

She was one of two students to receive the Prime Minister’s award for being the most outstanding local performers at CAPE that year.

The young scholar, who attended the Girls’ High School, is no stranger to academic excellence, having attained 15 Grade one passes at CSEC in 2015. She placed first in the then Common Entrance examinations in 2010.

Scott is scheduled to begin graduate studies at Harvard University this fall, where she will pursue her PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology.