General Admission 2025 took place on Friday July 4^th, with Selwyn students gathering in Old Court with their families and friends before the traditional procession to the Senate House to receive their degrees. The college warmly congratulates its new graduates.

In a speech to graduands at a dinner on the previous Wednesday evening, the master Roger Mosey quoted from a work by Peter Hall about the great cities in civilisation and what made them work. The reason for success, according to Hall, was that they were junction points: places that encouraged global interaction. “People meet, people talk, people listen to each other’s music and each other’s words, dance each other’s dances, take in each other’s thoughts. And so, by accidents of geography, sparks may be struck and something new come out of the encounter.”

Roger added:  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people said that about 21^st century Cambridge and London and the UK? You can sometimes see the shape of something in modern Britain that makes you hope it might be possible, and it does depend on us all: that we open our minds, that we retain an intellectual curiosity; and we don’t stick our fingers in our ears in response to each other’s music or boycott a dance festival we don’t like. Instead we try to spread what we do here: based on excellence and knowledge; and wisdom and a concern for each other.” 

A large selection of photographs by Howard Beaumont is available on the Selwyn Facebook and Instagram pages. www.facebook.com/Selwyn.College.Cambridge and www.instagram.com/Selwyn1882

The college is delighted by the success of its academics in this year’s University of Cambridge academic promotions.

These are our newly-promoted professors:

Professorships (Grade 12)
Professor Shaun Thomas Larcom, SE, assigned to the Department of Land Economy 

Dr Eloy De Lera Acedo, SE, assigned to the Department of Physics


Professorships (Grade 11)
Dr Ronita Bardhan, SE, assigned to the Department of Architecture

Dr Kai Liu, SE, assigned to the Faculty of Economics

Dr Christopher Daniel Briggs, SE, assigned to the Faculty of History

Dr Marta Halina, SE, assigned to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Congratulations to them all.
 

The distinguished Cambridge academic Professor Mary Beard spoke at Selwyn on May 27 about current issues ranging from President Trump to the purpose of museums in a conversation with the master Roger Mosey. At the heart of the discussion was freedom of speech and thought: how do we dial down the outrage in modern life and understand that issues are complex – and that we may disagree?

You can watch the video in full, including questions from the audience in the Quarry Whitehouse auditorium, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMBIzr5gbQs

The 2025 Ramsay Murray lecture was given at Selwyn on May 6^th by the distinguished historian Professor Sir Richard Evans. His title was “Hitler and Putin” and he examined the historical parallels – and the differences – between Germany in the Nazi era and Russia today. You can watch the lecture in full, including the question and answer session which followed, on our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltWcXEVsG9E

The Ramsay Murray lecture is an annual event organised by the college following a bequest from the late Lt Col Alexander Ramsay Murray (SE 1936). The first lecture was given in 1996, and in the years since it has become established as a prestigious series, delivered by a wide range of internationally distinguished academics and experts. They have recently included Frank Gardner, Anand Menon, Bridget Kendall and Lyndall Roper. The lectures have reflected Ramsay Murray’s wishes in that he wanted them to be of historical or general interest and ‘preferably of an interdisciplinary nature’.

Some of the previous lectures, along with a wide range of college events, are available to view on demand:

https://www.youtube.com/@selwyn1882

The college is thrilled to report that fellow Dr Marta Halina, a member of the Cambridge Department of History & Philosophy of Science, has been awarded a Pilkington Prize.

The Pilkington Prize awards were endowed and inaugurated in 1994 by Sir Alastair Pilkington to acknowledge excellence in teaching. The prizes are awarded to individuals who make a substantial contribution to the teaching programme of a Department, Faculty or the University as a whole.

The citation reads:

Dr Marta Halina has almost single-handedly overhauled our History & Philosophy of Science Tripos to make Cambridge one of the foremost places in the world to study philosophy of cognitive science, comparative cognition and AI. Prior to her arrival, there was no dedicated teaching on these topics: a major gap. Marta developed 48 hours of new lectures and 8 hours of new seminars, including seven entirely new courses. She has also, since long before lockdown and the pivot to remote teaching, been a leader in the use of innovative pedagogical strategies and technologies in the classroom.

At the postgraduate level, Marta led a major restructuring of our MPhil as well as changes to the support we offer our postgraduate students. She has introduced a very popular MPhil module, AI in Healthcare, and is in high demand for supervising both MPhil and PhD students. Most importantly, Marta's teaching is always marked by a concern to improve diversity and equality. Through her careful dedication to teaching, she has not only broadened the range of topics we teach and discuss but also who gets to discuss them. Marta's students rightly view her as a role model of how to do philosophy.

The college's 3-minute thesis competition is an annual highlight: a chance for students to explain their academic work to an audience in 3 minutes with the help of just one slide.

The standard this year, over the two nights of the contest, was exceptionally high. Congratulations to the winners:

•    Ranjana Ram, 3rd year (medicine)
•    Harriet Palmer, 3rd year (medicine)
•    Cian Williams, 4th year (natural sciences) 
•    Charlotte Phillips, 1st year PhD (atmospheric chemistry)

Charlotte and Cian are photographed after the March 20th event in the Quarry Whitehouse auditorium.

The Lent Bumps this March saw a terrific week on the river for the Selwyn College Boat Club.

They report:
*We are very proud to have won the Marconi cup - the award for the club with the most successful Lent Bumps campaign, calculated by the number of bumps per crew.
*Our second women’s crew W2 (pictured) won blades, bumping on 4/4 days.
*W1 won technical blades, bumping 4 times over 5 days.
*The men’s crew M1 went up +3 and M2 maintained at +0.

The college congratulates its rowers on this success.

If you want to support the Boat Club, read more here: https://www.sel.cam.ac.uk/alumni/supportselwyn/ergathon

Bridging Course 2025

Alongside the offer letters that we sent out to our prospective new undergraduate students at the end of January, selected offerholders also received invitations to Selwyn’s bridging course. We are running this initiative for the second time in early autumn 2025, following a successful pilot scheme in September 2024. Again, the course will be generously supported by the Isaac Newton Trust’s Widening Participation and Induction Fund. The programme is not a replacement for the full induction that all incoming students receive at the start of October, but provides additional and more tailored support to students who meet certain criteria.

The bridging course is designed for incoming students, identified through the contextual data collected as part of the standard admissions process, who come from schools and colleges and/or areas that don’t traditionally send many students to Cambridge, or whose education has been otherwise disrupted. Being invited is not a reflection on students’ ability or potential – they have been given offers through the same rigorous process as all other students at Selwyn, and have the capacity to thrive here. However, we recognise that not all of our incoming students have had the same opportunities up to this point. We want to use the bridging course to address some of those potential imbalances by introducing participants to life at Cambridge and to its styles of teaching and learning with the aim of giving them the best possible start to their time here.

Our first bridging course cohort of 15 students (pictured with course director Dr Tom Smith at their undergraduate matriculation dinner in October) are now halfway through their first year at Selwyn. We asked a few of them to reflect on their experience of the bridging course now that they are some way into their studies.

Arran, a historian, said that the chance to experience social and academic life at Selwyn before the start of his degree was important to him: “It broke down misconceptions about Cambridge.” He thought the course was particularly helpful in introducing him to the form of small-group supervisions – one of the main modes of teaching and learning in Cambridge: “Mock supervisions deconstructed the fear I had of having an actual supervision. The bridging course had the supervision environment, but without the stress, so the awkwardness was minimised when I had my real supervisions in term.”

Monesha, who studies HSPS, agreed that “the supervisions were definitely helpful,” and also that the more “granular parts” of the course, for example on how to access Moodle (a commonly used virtual learning environment in Cambridge) and library catalogues were valuable: “It made coming to university a bit easier as it meant I wasn’t having to plant my feet whilst simultaneously grasping how to use online resources.” Monesha picked out the end-of-course formal dinner as a highlight – one of a number of opportunities to explore “Cambridge customs” and everything the college, university, and city have to offer.

Asha, a geographer, agreed that the mock supervisions and the formal were enjoyable and valuable experiences, and that just being in Cambridge to “get used to the general layout of the schedule and how a day runs” was excellent preparation for degree studies.

We’re sure that our incoming cohort of bridging course participants for 2025 will have similarly positive experiences, and we’ll look forward to welcoming them.