Admissions Director’s report REPORT BY DR MARK KING
I
was delighted to be appointed in March as the College’s new Admissions Director and am very excited to be taking over the role as the College embarks upon this new phase in its life. I think it’s fair to say I couldn’t have anticipated when I started how much the next few months would then be dominated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the implications this would have for Higher Education admissions across the UK, but I’m proud of how we have responded as a College and the successes we have enjoyed in the face of this adversity. We ran an entirely virtual admissions round in March, which puts us in good stead for our first round as a standard-age College this autumn, and have adapted our outreach provision to focus on online events for the foreseeable future. We have also worked more closely than ever with our offer-holders, both undergraduate and postgraduate, to support them through these difficult times such that they will hopefully be able to take up their places here this autumn. As we look to the future, we have worked to develop our new admissions policy and an accompanying outreach and recruitment strategy that will allow us to achieve the goals of our transition. Lucy Cavendish has now committed publicly to the ambitious target of becoming the first Cambridge College to admit a majority of its students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds, and our message has been very well received by the students and teachers with whom we have worked this year. Our new programme of outreach and recruitment events will combine in-person events (when permitted again!) such as subject experience days, visits from schools and colleges and our first ever STEM residential with a broader package of online support, including bespoke webinars for our partner schools, subject enrichment material and admissions advice resources. Beyond this, every student who attends one of these events will be given the chance to enrol on our digital ongoing engagement programme, which will be designed to maintain their connection with the College and to support them to apply to us.
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ANNUAL REVIEW 2019/2020
The organisation and implementation of this programme will fall largely to our new Outreach Officer, Caitlin Law, who joined our team in October as part of a wider restructuring that is intended to support our transition to standard-age admissions and our new focus on underrepresented students. Caitlin is a former teacher with a longstanding commitment to widening participation in Higher Education and her input has been crucial to the development of our new initiatives. Elsewhere within the team, Lucy Bunker has moved to Undergraduate Admissions Officer, whilst Gaby Jones is now Admissions Officer for Postgraduate Applications and the Graduate Course in Medicine. As our mission changes to reflect the reality of Higher Education admissions in the twenty-first century, working with mature students will remain an important part of our remit. Such students remain significantly underrepresented at Cambridge and we fully intend to continue to support, recruit and admit mature applicants to the University and to continue the collaborative mature outreach work that we pioneered over the last few years. Both this work and our new outreach activities are enabled by the generous donations we have received from alumnae and other benefactors and we are especially grateful for such support during these challenging times.
