After two years of extensive refurbishment and expansion work, the College took possession of a renewed Cripps Court at the beginning of September. The finishing touches are now being put to the building and its gardens, and it will be fully operational for the new academic year beginning in October. The total cost of the project was £13m, and the College is grateful for the generous support it received from the Cripps Foundation.

The Selwyn choir has a growing reputation for its musical excellence; and this autumn it will be commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War with a number of special events. A highlight will be bringing together the poetry of Wilfred Owen with music in the College Chapel on Sunday November 2^nd, in a performance supported by the Wilfred Owen Association. It starts at 8.30pm, and admission is free.

The Master, Roger Mosey, has written about the College ‘cat’ in this week’s edition of the New Statesman:

As another Admissions process draws to a close, Admissions Tutor (Humanities) Dr Mike Sewell writes about what happened at Selwyn in 2013-14:

Selwyn invited Year 12 students to our first Sciences Summer School which took place between Monday 11th and Wednesday 13th August. Almost 40 students attended the residential course, and represented 26 state-maintained schools mostly from the College’s link areas in Scotland, West Yorkshire and East Berkshire.

If you’re holding a conditional offer of a place at Selwyn College and have met all the conditions in your offer and have the grades required, congratulations! A letter is in the post to you.

There’s a particularly good display this year in the Selwyn gardens, with the Victorian-style border a great showpiece in the lower College garden. This is accessible to everyone in the College and to visitors. Our photographs show some of the highlights, with guidance on the plants from our head gardener Paul Gallant – who, with his team, is responsible for one of the most attractive gardens in Cambridge.

Below is a photograph of Selwyn’s Freshmen of 1913: the young men who arrived at the College 101 years ago. They would have been just as excited about starting their University life as generations of students before and since, and with the same ambitions and hopes for the future. In that autumn nobody could have imagined the scale of the horror that lay ahead.

 

Selwyn features prominently in two new videos made about admission interviews for Cambridge University. Two Selwyn Fellows – Mike Sewell and Amer Rana – are quoted in The Times about the launch of the videos, which are an attempt to demystify the admissions system and particularly the role of the interview.