Sheraya Amarasekara
Sheraya Amarasekara is a member of the Sri Lankan national swimming team that will represent Sri Lanka at the 11th Asian Age Group Championships in 2024. With passions for mathematics and the performing arts, she believes that access to equal opportunities are critical to making the world a better place. Sheraya hopes to excel in the engineering field and use her creativity to aid underprivileged communities.
The Story
When she was 9 years old, she falsely started at one of her events at a swimming competition and the officials pulled her out of the race. However, the audience cheered and requested the officials to give her a second chance, at which point they did. This moment in her life made her realize the impact a community has on any one individual’s life and the overall impact of communities coming together and working as one.
Sheraya has been ranking in the top ten students in her year group since Year 7. She was awarded Commendation Letters for this achievement for 8 terms across her secondary school life thus far. She was awarded an academic scholarship in her Primary School for the year 2019-2020. Sheraya was selected among students from Years 8-10 and was awarded the Drama Prize for the academic year 2021-2022 and the Design and Technology Prize for the academic year 2022-2023 in her school’s Annual Prize Giving.
She competed at the Sri Lankan Nationals in June 2023 achieving four golds and one silver medal and was adjudged the current Sri Lankan Junior National Champion for U15 girls for the year 2023. Sheraya competed as a part of her school girls choir ‘Nothing But Treble’ in ‘Young Musicians of the Gulf’ and reached the finals in the academic year 2022-2023. She currently holds the following leadership roles at school: Student Learning Leader; Junior House Captain and Deputy Year Group Head of Maths Society.
Looking ahead, Sheraya intends to use her passions for creativity, mathematics and physics to pursue an engineering degree and use that knowledge to empower underprivileged societies across the globe. She looks forward to joining global impact-driven youth communities and attending international conferences to meet with like-minded individuals and organisations to further scale her initiatives and their impact.