Where are they now? 4 former straight-A Hong Kong students reflect on their lives

When public exam results are released each year, attention naturally focuses on top scorers. A brave new world awaits these straight-A students: scholarships, offers from top universities and stellar careers in business, research or academia. Or so the thinking goes.

Hong Kong's obsession with exam results accounts in part for the fuss over Miss Hong Kong 2015, Louisa Mak Ming-sze, another top student who went on to earn a law degree at Cambridge University.

However, life doesn't always unfold so neatly. For example, studious, rule-following youngsters don't necessarily come out ahead in the long run, according to a report published last month in the journal, that studied 745 children in Luxembourg over 40 years.

So how have Hong Kong students who achieved 10 As in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (replaced in 2012 by the Diploma of Secondary Education) fared as adults? We meet four top performers who finished Form Five about a decade ago.

With his stellar results in 2006, Arnold Chan Kwan-yeung skipped Form Seven and went straight into a business studies course at Chinese University that led to a job in asset management at Goldman Sachs. Joining the investment bank proved to be something of a culture shock.

"Goldman Sachs is an international bank. I was a student with little exposure to overseas culture. Although I joined university exchange programmes in Denmark and the US, I only hung out with Hongkongers. I was introverted when I was younger and didn't know how to get along with foreigners. So there was a big learning curve and a lot of stress when I first joined the bank," Chan says.