Celebrating Success: Karim Elmestekawy

Karim Elmestekawy (2016, Physics) recently graduated from Pembroke, achieving a first in Physics. His results were in the top 10 for his course across the entire university. We caught up with Karim, who looked back on his time at Pembroke, and discussed his plans for the future.

"I am very grateful that I ended up at Pembroke.

I was fortunate enough to receive a fully-funded Oxford scholarship to study my undergrad and that quickly formed my goals and determined my priorities. I wanted to focus on my academics and prove to myself that I belong at Oxford and am worth the scholarship, and Pembroke was a great place for me to do that!

I absolutely loved studying physics these past 4 years, the course was obviously demanding at times, but the content was thoroughly enjoyable, intellectually stimulating and extremely fulfilling. Some of the lectures, college tutorials and most difficult problem sets are actually the memories that I look back most fondly at from my undergrad.

The college as a whole has also been very supportive in encouraging me to strive to be better by offering the Rokos award for when I performed well in exams and for financially assisting the research internships I did over the summer.

I will be soon starting my DPhil in condensed matter physics working on perovskite solar cells with another fully-funded Oxford scholarship. There, I will be using the knowledge, experience, and support that I have gained at Pembroke to continue working on reaching my goals and to include more sports and extracurricular activities in my college life.

This whole experience has genuinely changed my life and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity that my tutors and the college has given me!”

This is the fourth article in our 2020 news series celebrating high performing Pembroke undergraduate students and recent alumni in their examinations. The first, which focuses on the collective exams success of the students this year, can be found here