FEATURE
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF… EVE SERGEANT
After graduating from Jesus College with a BA in History, Eve joined Homerton in August 2019 as Schools Liaison Officer, responsible for building Homerton’s relationship with schools and encouraging students in our Link Areas to consider higher education and apply to Cambridge.
9–10am
10–11am
Usually, two days a week I’ll be out visiting schools. Each college has a Link Area where they are responsible for making connections with local schools. Homerton’s are Scotland, South Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire and Richmond, Hounslow and Kingston in London. The Link Area scheme has existed since 2010, so some schools have good established links with us. There was already a mailing list of about 150 schools when I joined, and I send them a monthly e-newsletter and keep them up to date. But sometimes schools we’ve had no previous contact with will reach out to us, or I’ll suddenly be successful in getting engagement from a school we’ve previously had no luck with. Sometimes there’ll be one very keen teacher for a term or so, and then the role will move to someone else and we’ll lose traction.
If I’m visiting a school, I might be speaking in assembly to several hundred students, or running a small workshop with ten. I enjoy the bigger assemblies, but they’re probably the least impactful way that we engage. It’s much more powerful to be able to talk to smaller groups, or to bring students to Cambridge themselves. Around 50% of the students I work with are sixth formers, but we do a lot with Year 11 too. They’re a really good age group to target – if you raise aspiration at that point it can make all the difference. I’ve worked with children as little as Year 6 too. At that point it’s not about telling them to apply to Oxbridge; it’s more about giving them a fun day out, raising aspirations and hoping that something sticks.
11am–12pm At least one day a week we have school groups visiting the College. I’ll put together a timetable in advance with their teacher, but usually they’ll spend the morning having student-led tours in small groups, with lots of opportunities to ask questions, as well a larger presentations and Q&A sessions. With the older ones we’ll also try to build in some subject-specific sessions. They’re usually just on a day trip, so for the schools we work with in Yorkshire that might mean they’ve set off at 5am. They arrive a bit bleary-eyed, but so excited!
12–1pm If we have a school group visiting, they’ll all have lunch in the Hall. The looks on their faces when they see the Hall for the first time are always wonderful. That’s probably the thing I’ve missed most over the past year, when everything has had to be remote.
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HOMERTONIAN
