Patrick Jaffe

I think you can have multiple passions in life, and you don’t necessarily have to focus 100% on just one of them. I’m really fascinated by Economics as a discipline and I’ve really been enjoying studying it. I did look at double degrees, but in the end I’m quite happy with my decision, because it meant that I was able to study that a lot more in depth, and a lot of great chances came up that wouldn’t have otherwise – for example, I couldn’t have gone on exchange for a whole year if I did just Music or a double degree.

I did a one semester exchange in Aarhus in Denmark at the end of last year. I stayed over in Europe after that, and at the start of this year I moved over the border and did another semester in Sweden, in Uppsala. Unfortunately that got cut a little bit short by the COVID-19 situation, but both of those experiences were just amazing – brilliant countries to live in, and for me doing economics, I just found it fascinating learning from those countries with their welfare states and their stance on sustainability. I thought it was quite inspiring to learn about those fields, in a great university system over there. It was also great for my particular cocurricular interests. There’s an incredible music scene in both those countries, particularly for the styles of improvised music that I love.

I was probably about 11 or 12 when I started orienteering. It started because my dad was quite involved with the sport, but over the course of my time at the school, I started to really enjoy the training for it. While I was at school I was really lucky to be selected to run for the Australian junior team a couple of times, so I had some amazing experiences of going to those competitions in Norway and Switzerland, which were pretty special. Since finishing Year 12, I’ve been able to devote a bit more time to training, trying to increase my mileage and the technical training I do for the orienteering side of things. That was also part of the reason I went to Scandinavia. There are really challenging forests for orienteering over there, and there’s only a certain level you can get to by staying in Australia. At some point if you really want to lift your skills, you have to go and expose yourself to new and more challenging terrains, like the Scandinavian forests.

My album’s called Eldorado – it’s named after the tiny country town where my grandparents used to live. When I was growing up it was kind of like my childhood home in many ways. I’d describe the music as sort of halfway between jazz and classical. There are some improvised sections, but most of it is more reflective, sort of peaceful contemporary classical music. I think it has the potential to be enjoyed on many levels. It could be used as background music but equally, I tried to add lots of interesting harmonic movements in there, so if you are interested in music on that level, you can also get things out of it.

At the moment I’m researching options for postgrad study, potentially looking at going back to Europe for some kind of master’s degree. But I’m at a bit of a turning point now, I haven’t quite decided yet whether for the next period I’ll be focusing on my Economics studies and my music.

I remember when I was in Junior School, the Senior School Captain, Rohan Barmanray, came down and spoke to some of us when we were in Year 6. He gave us all a picture of himself giving a very cheesy pose with a thumbs up, and it said, “Are you testing your limits?”. He told us to pin it up on our wall and have that as a reminder. And I did actually keep that pinned up on my wall for pretty much the whole time I was at school, as a little reminder to keep pushing myself and I like to think I’m still doing that now.