Careers mapped out for Waimea academic duo

It was a busy year for both Waimea College’s proxime accessit winners, Mia Piggon and Jess Spurgeon, who are now focused on forging their careers as a veterinarian and a lawyer, respectively.

Both grew up in England, with Mia and her family moving between the two countries in the past few years, while Jess is planning to move back this year for study. For Mia, who lives at Brightwater and was an academic captain at school, her goal has always been a veterinarian career because of her love of animals, and this year she heads to Massey University for the pre-selection course. “I’ve wanted it my whole life - as long as I can remember - to be able to work with both animals and the people connected with them to improve their lives. It makes up such a big part of society and their well-being affects our life.”

Her focus at this stage is to get through the pre-selection course as only a third of students are accepted for the degree course. Ultimately though, she sees herself working with both small and large animals, especially equine due to her love of horses.

The past year she has worked at Spring Grove Kennels and Cattery where she does everything from picking up dog faeces to watering and exercising dogs, which she says is a good learning environment for animal behaviour. Richmond-based Jess was a head student at school last year and a buddy in the Big Brother Big Sister (BBBS) mentoring programme. She worked three shifts waitressing for a Richmond restaurant through the year and played netball for her Eve’s Apples-sponsored team, Eve’s Angels, which went to Fiji for a tournament prior to Christmas. In amongst all that was considerable fundraising for BBBS and netball.

“The amount of baking I’ve done this year has been insane. I’ve never baked so many brownies in my life,” she remarked of 2024.

Her first choice for studying law is Oxford University and she will be heading back to England in February for an interview, as well as looking for a full-time job until the start of the university year in September.

“I really enjoy the ethical and physiological discussions around law. People think about law as a set of rules, but in reality, when you’re studying it, there’s lots of things to be taken into consideration. There’s almost no right or wrong.”

Jess says she will likely work in England after her degree as there are more job opportunities for starting a law career.