Tell us about yourself.
Hi, I’m Joe, a third-year Chemical Engineering student here at Selwyn. I’m from Leeds in West Yorkshire, famed for giving the world soda water and Marks and Spencer.
Chemical Engineering? Why?
Chemical Engineering isn’t something you learn at school, so people often assume it’s the same as Chemistry and don’t see why it’s better. They are connected though, and I chose the subject because it seemed to be a blend of maths, physics and chemistry. I was too clingy to want to let go of any of these subjects at school, so this option was the perfect way to continue learning all three.
We’re usually concerned with producing and manipulating chemicals on an industrial scale. This needs to be done safely and a lot of our time is spent learning about how to stop things falling apart or exploding, or at least predicting when they will. If I could sum it up with less words, it would have to be angry plumbing.
What else do you do?
Outside of my subject I’m involved with Selwyn’s Boat Club, where I’m about halfway through my time as the Club’s Treasurer. I also spend a lot of my time here doing various bits of Outreach work, which is important to me since I would never have applied to Cambridge if it wasn’t for the great work that Selwyn do in my local area. I’ve spent the last year as one of the JCR Access Officers, where we’ve run events such as a tour of schools in West Yorkshire that reached hundreds of students that might not otherwise have thought that Cambridge could be for them.
I also ran this page, so I could make myself the first post of the new decade even though this photo was taken back in April. A decade is a long time when it comes to admissions, and if you look back at statistics from even 2010 you’d see we’ve come a long way but also have a way to go still. Thankfully, both the staff and students here work really hard to show people that Selwyn can be a realistic option for anyone of any background and I have no doubts that our successors in this role will do a better job than I have. So the future looks bright, unless Climate Change picks us off before then.