The Impact of Your Gifts
We are extraordinarily grateful for the generosity of alumni and friends because they make it possible for students, Fellows, and staff to have amazing experiences; support long and short term research; and allow us to ensure that the College will remain financially sustainable and resilient for centuries to come.
During the pandemic, hundreds of alumni have stepped up as never before to provide support for our entire community from student hardship to ensuring our Scouts could be fully paid during furlough.
For the first time in the college's history, students had to stay during the holiday periods, creating a complex logistical task as well as presenting a hardship challenge for the college. Whilst the bulk of the hardship awards distributed were to cover the costs of staying up over the Christmas break, there are two stories worth highlighting. One related to funding the purchase of IT equipment to enable a science student who, because of Covid, had to do work remotely which would not otherwise have been necessary, and for which the individual did not have the necessary hardware. The other was replacing income foregone because of Covid which the incoming student had been relying on earning last summer to contribute towards the costs of his first year. Both students come from less privileged backgrounds.
Student 1: “When I arrived at Pembroke in the middle of a pandemic, I knew that things would be different and my labs would be online. However, my old computer just wasn’t up to the demands of the software we needed to use, and there was no way I could afford a new one without support. Pembroke stepped in and provided me with the equipment I needed to do my course from afar - I’m very grateful to the Old Members that made this possible.”
Student 2: “The pandemic affected lots of people in different ways; for me, it meant that working through the summer vacation of 2020 was no longer an option, as I had to shield in order to protect a vulnerable parent. I was relying on that work to help fund my Medicine degree and was extremely worried about my finances without it, so I contacted the College to see if they could help. Pembroke’s hardship fund was able to fill in my unexpected shortfall, reducing my stress and letting me get back to learning how to combat this (and any future) medical crisis.”
Pembroke undergraduate STEM students are eligible to apply for our Rokos Internships Scheme. This provides full funding for an academic summer internship for any non-finalist, including accommodation, academic and living expenses. Below are just a few examples of projects with which our students have been involved:
- Rhiannon White, (BA Experimental Psychology, 2014) was awarded a prize from the Rank Prize Funds for her summer research project that was supported by both the Rank Prize Funds and the Rokos Internship Awards. Read more here
- In 2020 Charlie Pugh’s internship explored the use of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) as it can be applied to large data sets gathered by ecologists. Charlie says: “Although we carried this project out remotely, it was an engaging topic and I greatly enjoyed the zoom discussions and online research. I felt it was the best way to be stuck at home.”
- Silvia Shen used the covid pandemic as the basis for her study which demonstrated that the demographic structure of a population impacts the likelihood of a major outbreak through three age group-dependent factors: intra- and inter-age group contact rates, individual susceptibility and individual infectiousness.
- Olivia Kelly spent six weeks with Vlatko Vedral’s Frontier’s of Quantum Information Research group in the physics department at the University of Oxford. Her project was to look into a specific ‘quantum Maxwell’s demon’ thought experiment in which the familiar particle in a box setup of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment is replaced with a single photon in a box.
- Alex Welch had an internship in the Oxford Department of Biochemistry. His lab placement was with a team who use computational techniques such as simulation, modelling and bioinformatics to study ions channels and membrane proteins. He says: “I was able to get to know other researchers in the lab and learn about many new areas of biochemistry through enriching lab presentations and seminars…I learned how to present research clearly and effectively...Furthermore, I learned how to use computational tools such as VMD, GROMACS, PyMOL, and gained valuable experience with python scripts and coding. Frequent lab journal clubs also developed my ability to read papers critically.
Through the generosity of alumnus Julian Schild, History undergraduates and incoming students were able to make the most of their time over the summer to prepare for success for the year ahead.
Read more here
Through historic scholarships endowed by alumni years ago, as well as current giving, Pembroke is one of the most generous colleges when it comes to supporting graduate students. Learn what a difference this has made here.
Caring for the welfare and wellbeing of students and staff is increasingly important during the pandemic and beyond. Through the generosity of alumni, our Welfare Coordinator, Dr Rebekah White, has had a busy year. Read more about it, and her vision for the future here.
Read more here
Alumnus Chris Rokos has created an endowment that will enable us to reintroduce Computer Science to the College from 2022. Read here about the first appointee.
An anonymous alumnus has made a hugely generous gift of £1million to the College’s general endowment. Long-term investments that underpin the College’s future, the endowment is critical to not only our long-term financial stability, but our current ability to achieve our mission. To find out more read here. Please note, this paper was written in 2017. An updated version is being prepared and will be posted later in the year.