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Access Week 2025: From Local to Global

Designed to emulate 'a week in the life of an Oxford undergraduate', Access Week is an annual summer residential at Pembroke College. Select pupils from our target regions who have participated in our Access and Outreach programmes were invited to attend the residential, which took place this summer. We welcomed 120 pupils who participated in tutorials, seminars, mock interviews, academic trips, and much more.

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Reflections of a Recent Pembroke Graduate

Michaelmas term is fast approaching, which can only mean one thing – an onslaught of Freshers will be imminently arriving to Oxford and Pembroke. Starting university can be a big transition for anyone. We thought we’d ask one of our fresh graduates, Rohit Ghosh, to reflect on his time at Pembroke, looking all the way back to his own Freshers’ week.

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CCW’s Dr William James wins prestigious essay prize

NEWS |

Congratulations to Dr William James, who was recently announced as the winner of the Royal United Services Institute's (RUSI) Trench Gascoigne essay competition.

The competition, which dates back to 1874, challenges participants to produce an original piece of writing on contemporary issues of national and international defence and security. Dr James, who is the Transatlantic Defence Research Fellow at Pembroke’s Changing Character of War Centre (CCW), won first prize with an essay titled: ‘Between a pandemic and a hard Brexit: grand strategic thinking in an age of nationalism, great power competition and human insecurity’. The prize was presented to Dr James by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, and former UK Cabinet minister, Sir David Lidington, on December 17th 2020.

CCW’s director, Dr Rob Johnson, also won the same competition four years ago.

Reflecting on his achievement, Dr James commented:

“I am honoured to have won this historic award and am grateful to the judges for seeing value in my submission. 2020 was a gloomy year to put it mildly, so it was lovely to finish on a high. I hope the essay, which is soon to be published in the RUSI Journal, will be useful to policymakers and academics concerned with the current state and trajectory of British foreign & defence policy”.