Celebrating Success: Anna Carbery

This is the fifth article in our 2019 news series celebrating high performing Pembroke undergraduate students and recent alumni in their examinations.

Anna Carbery (MBiochem Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, 2015) recently completed her final year at Pembroke achieving a first-class degree. We caught up with Anna to congratulate her on her recent success. Below she discusses life at Pembroke and how she balanced her academic studies alongside her commitment to Pembroke Boat Club.

“When I was looking at different colleges, Pembroke stood out as somewhere that would allow me to make the most of my university experience. This turned out to be correct: over my four years at Pembroke, I was able to balance my degree with demanding rowing schedules at college and university level.

The biochemistry course was challenging from day one, so the support provided by the Pembroke tutors was invaluable, allowing me to fully enjoy the academic material while continuing training with the boat club. Pembroke was also able to alleviate some of the financial burden associated with full-time rowing training, through the Fitz Awards.

This approach to university life allowed me to experience many great opportunities both in sports and academically. In rowing, I won a Torpids headship in 2016 and coxed the Reserves Boat Race in 2018; in my fourth year research project, I used computer programming to investigate protein folding pathways as part of the Oxford Protein Informatics Group.

The support that Pembroke gave me during my degree helped me to secure a place in a DPhil programme in Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science, in which I hope to use data-driven methods to develop therapeutics. Balancing work and rowing seems to work well for me, so I will also continue to be involved in rowing, this time as a coach at Lady Margaret Hall Boat Club.”