SPRING GARDENS, St James — After opening its doors in 2018, Fairfield International Academy (FIA) is now basking in the success of having a student accepted to an Ivy League college in the United States.

Girdhar Chuganey, a grade 12 student at the school located in Spring Gardens, St James, is the first to achieve this feat. He is set to officially begin classes at Cornell University in New York this August when the fall semester gets going.

He is elated.

“It’s an Ivy League so I am very excited for it. When I got my acceptance I was so happy, it’s just an exciting experience and achievement overall,” Chuganey told the Jamaica Observer.

“I was at home alone but I was on a call with my parents when I was opening it, and when I told them they were like, ‘We can’t believe it!’ We’re just happy,” he added.

Cornell has been consistently ranked among the top 20 universities in the United States of America. Its alumni include a number of Nobel Prize laureates.

Chuganey, who scored an impressive 1540 on his Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), thinks Cornell is a perfect fit for him because of his areas of interest.

“The major I applied for is economics, and it also has a little bit of agricultural science in there — but that’s just a minor. I will be focusing on food security because Cornell has a good programme for that. I think they are the only Ivy League with their own agricultural college, that’s also why I was really excited to go there,” he said.

While he won’t be the first Jamaican student to attend Cornell, he still feels the weight of representing the country while he is enrolled.

“This feels very amazing because, ‘Wi little but wi tallawah’, so I guess that’s me embodying that,” he said.

He is looking forward to his college experience.

“I’m excited, because I’ve always been in a small school environment so I’m excited to see what a different [and] bigger environment is like,” he said.

While he looks ahead he took time to heap praise on FIA for its role in getting him into Cornell.

“Fairfield has benefited me because of the smaller class sizes; it’s more personalised. The teacher-student relationships are more personal so if you need guidance with anything, it’s easier to approach them, ask them, and of course they are more willing to help,” he said.

Chuganey hopes his achievement will influence other students to make the push as well.

“It feels good because I feel like me getting in is encouraging other students because FIA is a newer school. Maybe some people think it’s not possible but with me doing this now, they know it is,” he said.

“Going to an Ivy League sets you apart from the rest — especially for your future career — so that’s why I was really aspiring to go to one,” he added.

He is already looking ahead to what this will mean for his future.

“I would initially want to start off internationally with my career but maybe in my later years, depending on how things go, I think coming back to Jamaica would be nice,” he said.

Abby Majendie, who became head of school at FIA last year, is proud of the work her team has done.

“We are a new school, and to have Girdhar get accepted at Cornell it really shows us that we are on the right path and we are our own type of school. We are carving a unique path in education in the country and it was an affirmation that what we are doing is working,” she told the Observer.

“I was very proud of our teachers because they worked with Girdhar, provided him with that support as they did with all our students to make sure that they reach their college and career goals,” she added.

Majendie added that other students, who make up the 50-pupil population, have also been accepted to universities abroad.

“They are internationally respected universities in Canada, the US and the UK. One of our students got into the architecture school at the University of Toronto. All of our students matriculated into the universities of their choice — they got their top choices,” she said.