Celebrating the power of women

This is the last of our 60^th Anniversary Year blog posts. But for all our fans, don’t worry, we will be continuing to blog in other forums.   It has been so good to read the experiences of so many women this year: the students and their aspirations, the alumnae and what they have achieved, as well as celebrating our 60^th Anniversary events.

During the year, the College has moved on in lots of ways. We have begun to grapple more deeply with how our young women learn and how our supervisions can teach in a way which builds confidence, encourages, challenges and develops resilience to accept getting things wrong. The Gateway Programme has also developed to encompass graduate students and in particular to bring undergraduates (years 2 and 3) together with graduates for the career strand. We have also run the alumnae mentoring pilot for alumnae aged 25-35 years old; a great success and we will be rolling this out shortly.

In College we have just celebrated International Women’s Day with alumnae and students. Two brilliant graduate students, Lorna Omondi from Kenya and Noura Wahby from Egypt spoke about the role and status of women in their home countries. Lorna described some of her women heroes including Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai and how hard they had to struggle to be heard. Noura described the bravery of women in the Egyptian Revolution and what that had meant to the status of women. We were very fortunate too, to have Mariam Khalique with us. She is the head teacher of Malala’s school in the SWAT valley, Pakistan. Again, bravery is what she talked about. The determined bravery of girls to come to school even in the midst of terrorist attacks, including on Malala. And then the feeling that if girls were to want education so badly, their teachers must not let them down. SWAT is somewhat calmer now, though having seen the heart rending attack on the school in Peshawar, no one really knows that will happen next.

Mariam was with us because she was also speaking in the WOW (Women of the World) Cambridge Festival the next day as part of a panel on Girls’ Education internationally. We also heard from our young alumna, Zoah Hedges-Stock who came to us from the showmen traveller community. She described how hard her mother had worked to get her an education, even stopping travelling until Easter each year and stopping again early in September so that Zoah could go to school regularly for at least two terms each year.

The commonality of everything I heard that weekend was the absolute determination of mothers, teachers and girls to get an education. It was deeply moving and made me reflect as always about just how lucky we are.

On the third day, the University held a national conference on Women in Higher Education in the College. It looked at what is happening at student level but also the appalling statistics in University positions. Women are only 16% of Cambridge’s Professors and this is probably little different around the country. We have a long way to go. But the conference, complete with a number of Vice-Chancellors, Heads of Department from around the country, looked at the issues deeply. The changes we are making are deep cultural ones and they need to be well understood. So the discussions ranged from unconscious bias to whether in our so-called meritocracy, merit is judged differently by men and women.

Three thought-provoking days in the life of the College. But it wasn’t all so serious. At the Saturday event, we also had traditional Chinese flute-playing, Persian dancing and most gripping of all, Hip Hop dancing from students of the Kaetsu University, Japan.

All of this was a lovely way to celebrate women. Now on to the next phase of College life!

Barbara Stocking
President, Murray Edwards College
March 2015

Caring about the transformative power of education

I’m Ros Smith and I studied Natural Sciences at New Hall (now Murray Edwards) in the 1980s. No-one from my family had attended university, and so coming to Cambridge (from a small town in Yorkshire) was both a challenging and a life-enhancing experience.  I remember both the excitement and the apprehension that this generated – and the kindness and warmth of the people I met including the ever-friendly and ever-patient College porters.

On leaving Cambridge I undertook a PhD in electrophysiology at Leicester University and then joined the computer industry working my way up to a position as operations director and major company shareholder.

What I learned was the importance of education to what you can achieve. Education can be both personally fulfilling and inspirationally transformative. It allowed me to succeed in ways that I had never anticipated and I am wholeheartedly committed to the principle of educational progression based on academic ability rather than on class, background, colour or religion.

Success in the computer industry has meant that my husband and I have been able to actively support initiatives and institutions which help to further educational opportunities for all. We have founded bestCourse4me, a website to help students to make informed University choices; supported IntoUniversity, helping children from deprived backgrounds to gain the aspiration and achievements needed to access a University education; and supported Red Balloon, recovering bullied and traumatised children who are out of school, returning them to education.

In addition, we were able to make a significant donation to the College to help secure its future and its capacity to offer the sort of transformative educational experience from which I have benefitted so much myself.

Looking back over this blog now I am delighted to see how others have been able to make use of this opportunity.   I am especially excited by the experiences of students within the Gateway programme and the gap year scholarships. Students have used their Gateway opportunities to travel, work in voluntary projects, research projects, study jazz music and script-writing; and I have loved reading about the independence and skills developed by students on the gap year scholarships, working in different languages, teaching, shadowing a neurologist at the famous teaching hospital la Pitié-Salpêtriére. I wish I could have my student days again!

This to me is what education is all about and it remains a great pleasure to me to be associated with all that the College has done and continues to do.

Ros Smith
Alumna

Murray Edwards – Liberté! Egalité! Beyoncé!

From littering the college with posters that read ‘For Queen and Dome, Vote Olivia Barber for JCR President’, to attempting (but perhaps more accurately, failing) to conjure up and deliver a rousing speech, the elections for College student President were an exciting, albeit stressful experience. I was keen to take over the position because I wanted to represent the student body effectively and make the JCR a real force for change around college. Yet, during this year I realised that in order to fulfil this commitment I needed to understand the college and its community, the plethora of factors that define its identity, as well as what it truly means to be one of the members of a college for self-defining women.

What immediately struck me is the solidarity of the college and that when students appear to be hesitant to get involved in student politics, it is simply because the issues under discussion are not of the most fundamental importance to them. Nonetheless, when you strike at the core of Murray Edwards’ identity, its concern to put women first, you realise that many wish to stand up and unite in feminism and the appreciation of the amazing work that this college does to empower young women of today. For, as unfortunate and unacceptable a situation as this is, gender inequality still persists, making bastions for women’s development and education such as Murray Edwards ever more relevant. As this 60th blog has shown, women from Murray Edwards (past and present) are ready to ‘lead the way’ using their abilities to shape the future wisely, positively and constructively.

Yet, what has struck me most is not only the efforts of the college in promoting these important changes but also the sheer strength and determination of the student body to unveil and redress huge inequalities at play. This year, we have revived the Murray Edwards feminist society and had over forty impassioned students turn out to discuss the identity of the college and its stance on feminism at an event organised by our Women’s officer, called ‘Liberté! Egalité! Beyoncé!’. We have also founded a feminist film society and launched it with a screening of a French New Wave film that brings to the fore some of the obstacles that surround female liberation and presents the different lived experiences of feminism from the perspectives of two female friends.

What we can take from this is the fact that these various different platforms for discussion have made the women of Murray Edwards more united than ever, allowing us to be proud of the fact that our college is an important and powerful space for women. Some use this space as the basis of their quiet confidence and strength, others as the springboard for a more forthright contribution. All are important.

Olivia Barber
Undergraduate student

A not-so-secret life of a PhD student

I am Aleksandra Przydrozna, currently a final year PhD student in the Department of Engineering. My research focuses on improving efficiency of space heating/cooling.

When I started a PhD, I had no idea what to expect. The ultimate goal was obvious – a PhD degree, but a path to achieving this was undefined and somewhat scary. After all, by signing a PhD contract, I committed to work on one project for the next 3+ years and I wanted to make the most of this experience.

It took me few months to get used to the new environment and the new line of work. By this time I have realised that patience and perseverance are key to pushing my research forward. Of course, it is easier said than done, especially when you are very passionate about your research and you can’t help but want to see some results immediately. For this very reason, a PhD can be filled with extreme `highs’ and `lows’. It is fulfilling and satisfying, when your experiments are working or you discovered something new and unknown. It can also be depressing at times, when you realise that your current direction leads to nowhere and you need to start over.

However, you are never alone in this process. You are surrounded by people who are going through this period as well and they can relate to your problems. I am very lucky to be a part of such a friendly graduate community in Murray Edwards. The young women, I have met in ME in course of last few years, are all very ambitious, talented and supportive. I believe that our friendships will stand a test of time and will last forever. The College keeps our community vivid by organising numerous social events and providing us with a Graduate Formal Hall every Tuesday, where we meet and exchange our weekly stories.

Overall, PhD research is a very unique experience with an infinite number of possible routes that can be undertaken in pursuit of some answers.

Aleksandra Przydrozna
PhD Student

Learning, researching and publishing: early steps in an academic career

I joined the college as a Junior Research Fellow in 2014 from UCL where I specialized in the history of science and medicine, and East European Studies, so my first year in College has paralleled the passage of our 60^th Anniversary blog. What I’ve noticed is a community which is hugely diverse, with staff, students and alumnae not only contributing to life in College and Cambridge, but also to wider society, with an incredible range of skills and interests. It has also encouraged me to reflect on my own aspirations and expectations as an early career researcher.

My work focuses primarily on the history of mental health and its treatment in the modern period up to the present. This is a topic with which a number of students are engaging with in their research essays and dissertations at Cambridge. As a result of this current interest, I recently began convening a Graduate Seminar on the area at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science for students to explore the literature surrounding historical development of psychiatry and psychology, as well as contemporary policy debates in mental health. In the Easter term we’ll be visiting the newly opened Bethlem Museum of the Mind in South London, which holds archival and gallery materials along with new exhibitions that I hope will stimulate further discussion and research on the topic.

The Junior Research Fellowship system at Cambridge offers a unique level of flexibility, allowing early career scholars to have autonomy over how they develop their skills and research in a way that is most appropriate for their career stage. The fellowship has provided the time and space to allow me to complete a co-edited volume entitled Psychiatry in Communist Europe, which will be coming out with Palgrave MacMillan later this year, along with a collaboration with the British Psychological Society on their forthcoming book project, Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives.

A career in social media: from Theology to Microsoft

I work in the relatively new and very fast paced world of social media and web content. I’m employed by a first party Xbox video games studio to run their social channels (nine channels over six platforms) and create content for their website. I also help plan and execute marketing campaigns, write scripts for and produce marketing videos and provide the studio with a direct route to their fans and customers.

I studied Theology and Religious Studies at college, not the most obvious degree for what I’ve ended up doing. My role as Entertainments Officer on the JCR provided me with valuable experience that I still draw on today! After I graduated I returned to college as a member of staff, a very strange feeling indeed. I became the college’s Schools Liaison Officer for a year. The role gave me a wide variety of skills and experience. I stayed in the role for 12 months then moved to the Midlands with my other half (now soon to be husband).

After a few months of fruitlessly applying for jobs my heart wasn’t in I got some freelance writing work through a friend. I really enjoyed the work and began taking on more and finding other places to write for. When my grandfather offered – so kindly – to fund an MA in Journalism to extend my career options I was thrilled. The 12-month course gave me lots of real world experience and reawakened my passion for learning. Within five weeks of finishing up teaching for the course I was starting my current role. Working for Microsoft is fantastic. I get to work in an industry that combines creativity with technology and offers up amazing opportunities. I used to use social media to market events and stay connected whilst I was a student and now I’ve made a career of it!

I’ve continued to maintain a connection with college. It was – and will remain – a very important place to me. I’ve offered career advice through the Gateway Programme, become a year rep for the Alumnae Office and signed up to donate to the Rosemary Murray Fund through a telephone campaign. Help from the fund eased a lot of financial pressure on me during my second and third year so I wanted to give the same help to a current student. My experiences at college have helped shape me so it’ll always be a part of my life.

Emma Riordan
Alumna

The importance of meals to College life

I came to Murray Edwards from a corporate hospitality background and I was eager to see how different the University world was compared to the sites I had spent the better part of my career operating in.   With some trepidation I was leaving a hugely demanding position with a major sporting venue to contribute to the day to day life of a student community as the ‘Front of House Operations Manager’.

My first thoughts about Murray Edwards after my initial few weeks were how welcoming everyone I encountered was and I felt that the College as a whole had a very open and relaxed feeling of inclusiveness. I quickly came to realise that for most of the students who stay with us be it for one or multiple years we are a home-from-home and the service that the Catering team provide is hugely important, whether this is ‘Formal Halls’, dinner, cafeteria, social events or just a chat in passing.

It became very obvious that meal times were not just a chance for a well-earned break from study or supervisions but also a vital social opportunity for our students and college community. This is always evident at our popular Saturday Brunch service where we can see over 500 students, many not from Murray Edwards! It is always a nod of approval when the student body feel keen to bring guests to meal times.

In the short time I have been here I have begun to understand how empowering an all inclusive supportive College environment can be, I have witnessed prospective students and first years blossom into confident women, who will have the ability and self-belief to achieve their goals, and graduating students who are keen to get out into the world and make a difference. I am proud that in some small way the Catering Department become part of their rewarding journeys.

Teri Byrne
Front of House Operations Manager

‘How do you do it?’: Aiming high in study and sport

Having combined my academic life with sport ever since I can remember, the thought of playing two university sports at Cambridge never really fazed me, and throughout first year I played for the university tennis Blues and the hockey seconds team, thoroughly enjoying every single moment I stepped on the court or the pitch.

Of course, off the sports field I had to work hard to keep the balance moderately achievable, but that was all part of the joy and challenge that my first year in Cambridge posed. Around 20-25 hours a week was portioned off for my sport, including training, fitness and biweekly matches, which, combined with learning both French and Russian ab initio, required tremendous organization and planning. However, sport has always shaped my day-to-day life and I continue to reap the benefits.

Whenever I was asked, ‘how do you do it?’ I responded with surprise, since I hadn’t ever considered how I wouldn’t! But the simple answer was, that when I wasn’t training, doing early morning fitness, or travelling to matches, be it to Exeter, or North Norfolk, I was forced to be very disciplined with my time and in all honesty, it was something that I enjoyed so the minor sacrifices (of sleep most of the time!) were worth it. Moreover, the financial support provided by College through the Blues funding made a huge difference to off-setting the costs incurred through playing two university sports.

It is no secret that there are links between sport and academic achievement. Studies have demonstrated that playing sport equips a person with skills that can complement academic studies: whether it be the possession of good time-management, high levels of concentration, or the process of creating goals and working towards them. Not only is it ‘soft skills’ that are accumulated through sport, but scientific research has also shown that physical exercise can be tightly correlated with mental acuity.

The recent campaign launched by Sport England; ‘This Girl Can’, is one that should be commended, as should any campaign that encourages activity. However, the focus appears to be more on the appearance of the females taking part, rather than their efforts and achievements. I know from personal experience, as well as from seeing how well all of the members of the Murray Edwards sports teams do, that appearance is very much a minor issue when it comes to getting active. As part of my role as Sport Officer on the JCR, I am trying to bring awareness of the benefits of sport and of the achievements of our sports teams to help further encourage an active environment.

Sport has opened my world so much over the past few years, getting me into student journalism, travelling and meeting new people; experiences that I hope to take forward and learn from wherever I go in the future.

Flora McFarlane
Undergraduate student

An evening of online networking with Murray Edwards alumnae

Hi, I’m Weichao, a second year PhD student from Singapore currently working at the Biological Soft System sector at the Cavendish Laboratory. It’s my pleasure to join Murray Edwards College as a graduate student as I have received so much advice and support from the college.

Recently, I participated in a career development event where the College Gateway team offered online sessions for students with our alumnae in relevant academic and industrial sectors. I signed up to the event hoping to gain a better knowledge of the career options available for female STEM (science, technology and engineering) students. To my surprise, I not only had interactions with alumnae from various sectors, I also received advice on how to progress in the next step of my PhD journey. On top of that, I had the opportunity to connect with an alumna from Microsoft, who was very helpful in directing me to other relevant departments in Microsoft to answer my questions on internship opportunities there.

The event was very well organized as well. Before the start of the online session, the profile of each alumna was collated in a document so that we could prepare ourselves and our questions. I chose three alumnae I particularly wanted to speak with and was also allocated two others. I had a 10 minutes chat online with each of them. Within an hour, I managed to speak with five alumnae, each in a different discipline. This would not have happened if the Gateway and IT teams had not put in so much effort into preparing for the networking sessions and had the laptops and software all set up beforehand.

This year, Murray Edwards College has put in a lot of effort into preparing its students for the ever more competitive job market. Besides the speed-networking session, I have also participated in a CV workshop and will attend a workshop on graduate careers in the weeks to come. Overall, I could not ask for more career advice and support for graduates that our college could offer. I hope in the years to come, I can be the alumna offering advice to future Murray Edwards students!

Weichao Zhai
PhD Student

‘Trust in me’: the politics of record keeping

I’ve always been interested in the power of archives. As a history undergraduate it became clear to me that women were excluded from the historical narrative because they did not feature in historical records in the same way as men. I read some Foucault, became convinced of the hegemonic potential of archives, and set out to study for an MA in archives administration at Liverpool University. But at the time, as I discovered, English archival practice conformed to very traditional, positivist ideas – an archivist should be a non-interventionist, invisible figure who left no mark on the unmediated ‘truth’ of the historical record – and I went on to do a PhD in early modern history at Cambridge instead.

Having a professional qualification in addition to a PhD has been very useful: as well as an unusually sound knowledge of English archives as a graduate student, I had a professional escape-hatch when academic history jobs looked scarce – the archival profession, invigorated by the internet, offered endless possibilities and appeared to be run by women, while history still looked male-dominated to me. I’ve had interesting times as an archivist, too, especially working with colleagues in developing countries, discussing record-keeping as an exercise in democratic accountability (as well as colonial control), and training archival students at UCL.

Recently, records, information, and even archives have become obviously political (think Hillsborough Inquiry, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as well as recent cyber-hacking) – but historians have only just started thinking about the (considerable) implications of this for their own archival sources. To my great delight we were able to raise some of these issues at a conference held at the British Academy in April 2014, entitled ‘Transforming Information: record keeping in the early modern world’, which I co-organised with colleagues Alex Walsham and Liesbeth Corens. This was a public conference, attended by archivists and historians alike, and we spent two days discussing ways in which archivists, government officials, merchants and others had intervened in the historical records of early modernity. My own paper, Friction in the archives, investigated the fraught politics of custody and access to records during the English revolution, when all sides sought to control records which gave them land, title, and political legitimacy. At a time when TV and the heritage industry present history as a leisure activity, it’s really important to remind ourselves that history, records, and even archives, are political weapons too, and we need to use them with great care.

An audio-record of Transforming information is available here: http://pastandpresent.org.uk/conference-audio-from-transforming-information-and-history-after-hobsbawm/; and the proceedings will be published in 2016 as The social history of the archive: record keeping in early modern Europe.

Dr Kate Peters
Director of Studies in History