Bath and UCL students win Changing Faces Essay Prize 2009

Changing Faces’ first essay prize has been won by two university students. Two awards of £500 will be presented to Charlie Khoo and Natalia Kucirkova for their interpretation of the subject ‘Coping with Disfigurement’.

Charlie Khoo, a medical student at University College London, has just completed his second year, and is due to start an iBSc on the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Collection in September. His essay titled ‘Perceptions of Beauty in a Western Society’ looked at the social effect of disfigurement and the role the media can play in this.

Joint winner, Natalia Kucirkova will be graduating from Bath University with a BSc Hons in Psychology in July. Her essay titled ‘Intimate memoir of a journey to an embodied self’ is the fictional journey of a women being diagnosed with cancer and reflecting the importance of the right therapeutic intervention that helped the patient regain her self confidence and self esteem.

The prize was open to under- and postgraduate students of medicine, dentistry, psychology, nursing, social work, play therapy, and professions allied to medicine (prosthetists and orthotists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists). Each essay was judged by members of the Changing Faces Research Council.

You can read the winning essays here:

Perceptions of Beauty in a Western Society