Our final Undergraduate Open Day of the year took place last Friday with several hundred prospective applicants coming to visit Pembroke. It was lovely to welcome so many students to College and hopefully we will be seeing some of them in the near future as Pembroke’s newest freshers!

Earlier in September, Walter Isaacson returned to Pembroke, where he first arrived as a Rhodes Scholar in 1974 to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, to give a lecture titled ‘Lessons of the Great Innovators: From Leonardo da Vinci to Elon Musk’.

In August, Pembroke was home to 100 Year 12 pupils who experienced ‘a week in the life’ of a Pembroke student as part of our OxNet programme. 

This year, Access Week coincided with the 400th anniversary of the College’s Foundation Day, when an oration was given by a Pembroke student on the official opening of the then new College. To mark the occasion, Access Week pupils experienced a re-enactment of that oration. 

Congratulations to Pembroke alumna Erin Kennedy (2011, History and English) who has won a gold medal in the Paralympic Games as the cox for the Team GB PR3 Mixed Coxed Four boat, having started her career at a Freshers' Week taster session at the Pembroke boathouse.

Many congratulations to Pembroke Lecturer in Experimental Psychology and PPL Samuel Recht for receiving the Fyssen Young Investigator Award this summer. The award celebrates his work on the cognitive science of curiosity and introspection. 

Thirteen years ago, Erin Kennedy (2011, History and English) set foot in a boat for the first time as part of a Freshers Week taster session for Pembroke College Boat Club. Today, she is preparing to compete for Team GB in the upcoming Paralympics as the coxswain of the PR3 Mixed Coxed Four. We sat down with Erin between training sessions to discuss her "accidental" journey into professional rowing, her time at Pembroke and what it's like preparing for the biggest sporting event in the world.

400 years ago, Pembroke College was formally opened as the newest college of the University of Oxford. To celebrate the occasion, we invited our OxNet Access Week residential students to join us in 17th century music, dance, and a re-enactment of the original opening ceremony. 

Earlier this year, Professor Lynda Mugglestone, Pembroke Fellow in English Language and Literature, was awarded a Harvard University Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship which will allow her to continue her research into renowned Pembroke alumnus Samuel Johnson, author of the first comprehensive English dictionary. 

Annabel Eyres first learnt to row during her time at Pembroke, where she studied Fine Art between 1984 and 1988. By 1992, she had rowed in two Boat Races and was heading to Barcelona for the Olympic Games that summer. This year, Annabel makes her return to the Games, though in a form more closely related to her degree subject than her extracurricular activities – as an Olympic artist.