Nicola Terceira, Rhodes warrior

Excerpt from the May 27 issue of the McGill Reporter by Bronwyn Chester

Among her ancestors, Nicola Terceira counts an English mutineer and a privateer. While she and these fellow Bermudans hail from different centuries -- the first, Christopher Carter, the island’s first settler, jumped ship in 1600 while Hezekiah Firth arrived with his treasure in the early 19th century - they share a sense of nonconformity, determination and a love of Bermuda.

What sets Terceira apart from these outlaws, however, is that she’s managed to make use of these characteristics within the law, something that has brought her many rewards in life, the most recent of which being a Rhodes Scholarship. That also means that come next September, she’ll cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from her English predecessors, when she settles into Trinity College, Oxford, to do her M.Sc. in epidemiology, evolution and the control of infectious disease.

After a "tough" interview for the scholarship, held last December in Bermuda, Terceira had no idea how she’d done. Then she learned that evening of her success, left the next day for a family holiday to London, and celebrated with them over dinner and champagne.

Nicola Terceira, an honors student in Microbiology and Immunology, will receive her B.Sc. Honours degree, Monday June 7 at 2:00 pm, together with fellow Rhodes scholar Marco Gualtieri (Joint Honours Program in Mathematics and Physics) at the Faculty of Science’s Convocation in Place des Arts (Salle Wilfrid Pelletier).

After completing her studies at Oxford and studying medicine somewhere - she’s deferred her acceptance at McGill - Terceira plans to return home. "I’m hoping for a position in the Department of Health," she says, explaining that there’s a need for someone to improve communications between the public and private health sectors in Bermuda.