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

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. 10–11am

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.

1–2pm

Around 90% of my role is access and outreach, and the remaining 10% is admissions. December is completely taken up with interviews. In normal times I coordinate the student helpers who look after the applicants and show them where they need to go. This year the interviews were all conducted remotely, but we still had a virtual waiting room on Zoom so that the applicants could chat to current students, which a lot of them did.

Then in August, when A level results come out, I help to sort out the Pool, and all calls to Admissions are redirected to me. In 2020, (when results were decided by an algorithm, until a Government U-turn meant that they were decided on the basis of teacher assessment) I had a lot of crying students and parents on the phone. It was an exhausting couple of days, but it must have been so much more so for them, and I felt that the least we can do as a College is to provide a human they can get at. Fortunately most of them were helped by the U-turn and ended up with the results they deserved.

2–3pm

Usually in the summer we would travel to Scotland for a week with a group of student helpers to visit lots of schools in one go, and we would also host a residential week in College for 60–100 school students.

None of that has been possible this year, but instead we’ve hosted taster days and sessions on Zoom, as well as webinars that mirror what a day at Homerton would be like for different subjects.

Last summer, we also launched the Homerton access course, aimed at Year 12 in our link areas, but open to anybody. It’s nine weeks long, with themed webinars covering each aspect of the application process, from personal statements to interviews to subjects. I do the same session live four times each week, and students watch from home.

For the first course we had 250 participants, and over 700 have signed up for the spring one, from Hounslow to the Highlands. It would be impossible to replicate that in real life – before Covid I’d have had to squeeze all that information into one assembly. It’s one real positive that I’ll take away from this time, realising how useful virtual engagement can be. When this year’s applications came in, several of them mentioned that they’d taken part in the access course.

3–4pm

For two days a week I’m usually planning, based in the Tutorial office. The student community is so strong at Homerton, and people are so willing to help. When I first started I did some training with student helpers on how to answer difficult questions, and 150 of them turned up. I’ve really missed being around them all.

I came to Cambridge from a big state school in Wymondham, Norfolk. My mum had been to university but no one else on either side of my family had. I hadn’t realised before I started that there was a whole community of students who were interested in access, and I quickly got very involved in that.

By the time I graduated I knew that I wanted to work in education or for a charity. I already knew Homerton well because I’d had a lot of my supervisions there, with Bill Foster (Director of Studies in History). It’s just as friendly as everyone says it is, so this really felt like my dream job when I saw it advertised.

4–5pm

I’ve spent almost all of the past year working from my parents’ home in Norfolk, which has been a bit strange! We do quite a lot of work with external partners and educational charities such as the Brilliant Club, the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Foundation, so I’ve been keeping those connections going.

I miss travelling and engaging with students and teachers, but mostly I just miss seeing the looks on students’ faces when they see everything for the first time. Cambridge and Homerton, by existing, do half of my job for me.