PROFILE/SAEEDA VERRELL; Fulbright NZ Scholarship Winner

By MAYNARD, Anna

107365 US bound: Saeeda Verrall after graduating from Otago University.

S OW and ye shall reap seems to sum up how one woman, brought up in the remote Southland town of Te Anau, lives her life.

Recent Fulbright New Zealand scholarship winner Saeeda Verrall has continually impressed with her aim-high attitude.

This weekend Ms Verrall, 25, will leave her job in Wellington as a junior prosecutor at the Crown Law Office and head to Boston to complete a year at Harvard Law School, leaving 23-year-old partner Thomas Horder behind.

Mr Horder is finishing his law degree and they both felt being apart was just something they needed to do to get ahead in life.

“I hope time flies in that respect.

He’s coming over for Christmas,” Ms Verrall said.

After finishing school in 1999, she went to Otago University and completed a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) with honours.

She has fond memories of her years at university and still notes the differences between living in Dunedin and her schools years in Te Anau.

“I loved growing up in a small town but I certainly loved the social side of Otago and meeting a lot of new people.” With some spare time between graduating and a job as a judge’s clerk in Auckland, Ms Verrall decided it was time to do something for someone else. So she put her hand up for volunteer work in Vietnam and landed herself a job teaching English there for two months.

“It was really challenging. It forced me out of my comfort zone a bit. It was an incredibly rewarding experience. I sometimes think I got more out of it than the students.” Ms Verrall’s parents, Bill and Latheefa, both work at Fiordland College, where Ms Verrall was educated.

“We’re extremely pleased because we feel she’s a child who’s worked consistently over her entire life,” Mr Verrall said.

His daughter always gave 100 percent in everything she did, he said.

She was a top student at her school and the leader of a debating team that won the cup each year for three years.

It does go to show that small isolated schools could still produce scholars like any school in any city anywhere, he said.

Ms Verrall often wrote short stories and won first prize for two of them in The Southland Times competitions in 1994 and 1995.

She had a keen interest in writing from a young age and gained encouragement and motivation to keep writing outside of school. She also kept herself busy with public speaking.

“Things like the public speaking and the short story competitions provided a good foundation for my career path in the law,” she said.

“Things like that were very important in that they taught you the value of doing things outside the classroom.” Mrs Verrall, a teacher at the college, originally came from the Maldive Islands to New Zealand on a scholarship when she was 16.

The scholarship was part of the Colombo Plan, a collective inter- governmental effort towards the economic and social development of member countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Like Ms Verrall will be after her study year, Mrs Verrall was expected to return to her home and give back what she had learned to her community.

Ms Verrall applied for the Fulbright award after hearing about it through some of her professors at Otago University.

A telephone call last year confirmed her place overseas as a law student and she was awarded the scholarship at a formal function in Parliament last month.

“I was quite honoured to get it and quite humbled I guess.” Another scholarship, the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship, which Ms Verrall was granted through Harvard Law School together with the Fulbright award, will see her through the year.

Her studies at the law school will begin at the end of August and before that she will attend a month-long pre-academic orientation course which will give her an introduction to the United States legal system.

Ms Verrall says she will continue her visits to her home town in Southland when she returns from the US.

“I’ll always think of Southland as home. I’ll always have family there.

I love going back to Te Anau for holidays and things,” she said.

“I think it’s somewhere you appreciate a lot more when you come back.”

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