The Health of the College

Lionel D’Souza

Professor Julia Gog OBE (1994) proposed the health of the College at the Commemoration Feast, 12 March 2021

Master, Fellows, scholars and guests:

It is wonderful that we can still mark the Commemoration of Benefactors, even if it must be online. And of course there are silver linings to this as well. I know there are some of you out there joining today who would not have been able to come to Cambridge in person – I am delighted to be sharing this event with you, via internet magic.

I am sure at an event like this we are all thinking back to when we were able to gather together in large numbers for special evenings in Trinity’s marvellous dining hall. And maybe also thinking of the first such occasion, which for many of us of course was our matriculation dinner.

Though my own matriculation was 27 years ago now, I remember the dinner well, as I was seated next to the wonderful Lady Atiyah. For me, the prospect of the dinner was both exciting and frightening. Arriving at the dinner, all scrubbed up and struggling with my gown; honestly, I was terrified: so much cutlery and so many glasses! But Lady Atiyah looked after the freshers around her. She explained to us in her straightforward way that for cutlery it is start on the outside and work inwards, and everything else was mostly obvious. I was then able to relax, take it all in and thoroughly enjoy a very special evening indeed.

Thinking about matriculation, my thoughts turn to the current students during these times, and particularly to all the new undergraduates and graduates who must be missing out on special events in person. And as well as the big milestones, of course, so many day-to-day things that make up College life cannot currently happen in the same way that they did for us. But, we can hope that, like every generation of new members of Trinity, new students take the situation in which they find themselves and make it their own. So we can expect the Trinity student community will find new ways to connect and maintain a thriving society. Maybe it will not be anything like how those of us who matriculated last century would ever have imagined, yet alone being anything that Trinity members from centuries further past would outwardly have recognised at all. But maybe some of the new ways, borne out of necessity

imposed by current times, will be worth keeping into the future. Maybe Trinity’s current students will be major innovators, perhaps in very many ways.

Still, I do not think there is any online replacement for the experience that many of us had at around this time of year ‒ getting up in the cold at silly o’clock in the morning to cycle across Jesus Green to head to the boathouse. Or maybe we file this one under silver linings?

Thinking back again to my own experiences as a first year, I loved being at Trinity. The life, the company and the Maths Tripos were everything I had hoped for and more. I was very lucky, but indeed I wondered if I was too lucky. Like so many freshers, I had many moments when I believed that I must have got in through some administrative mistake. I could not shake the sense that at some point, inevitably, they would surely realise their terrible mistake, that I was not quite what they were expecting me to be. I would be found out. These days, we have a name for that feeling: “Imposter Syndrome”.

But, it did not paralyse me, and I carried on in the meantime with it, thinking I would make the most of the time I have, probably before I would fail my Part IA exams. I thrived on the maths itself, and on being among the friends whom I had made, and wider College life (especially First & Third). Passing my Part IA exams, even doing well, was not enough to shake off the imposter syndrome – irrational fears tend not to roll over in the face of new evidence. But I did learn how I could live with it: focus on the task in front of me and remember my motivation for doing it.

A feeling of complete disorientation ‒ of being in a very different world where we do not yet know how things work, where we fit or what will happen – surely resonates in many ways with what we have all been through in the last year. For me too, these have been “interesting times”. I have been among the scientists called upon to offer what we can in advice to our policy makers. I serve on the pandemic modelling group called SPI-M, and also contribute through SAGE, the scientific advisory group to the UK government. I have worked on many aspects of this pandemic, but particularly reporting to SAGE on both schools and higher education.

At first, in the early days, this was on questions about what would be the effects on the looming pandemic of closing schools, and now twice we’ve been through supplying the advice on reopening schools and universities – where there really are no easy answers. The safety of educational settings during this pandemic

has often been a long way from clear, and the role of schools and universities in wider transmission risk to community is tangled up with so many other moving parts. And meanwhile we know there have been immense harms caused by school closure and educational disruption to our children and our young people. On these and many subjects, the scientists called upon to serve have been asked to address impossible questions. And it has been our duty to respond as best we can.

I am more at home in a maths department coffee room than a department of health meeting room. I have some sense of how to function in an academic world, but not so much in that of government. Needless to say, this disorientation and being faced with seemingly impossible asks have again brought out the imposter syndrome loud and clear. The difference this time is that I know that I can function despite it, and that I can acknowledge that it is there. And maybe it also has its uses in this high pressure situation – as a reminder that I can’t personally solve everything here and it would be lunacy to expect that of myself or of anyone else. But I can focus my efforts on the specific thing I am working on at any given time and do my best there, and keep sight of why I am doing this.

This service is something that I know that I owe. I have been given amazing opportunities up to now, including at Trinity. Indeed, my path from mathematics to pandemics is very much a Trinity story. It is one I will happily bore anyone in detail with over a drink when we can meet in person – it involves a series of unlikely events, including reading the wrong pages of a textbook whilst I was a Part III student. After I had finished Part III, for once I knew clearly what I wanted to do: move to the Department of Zoology for my PhD, where there was a research group modelling infectious disease. Cutting to the chase, it was Trinity College that stepped in to make this happen, again changing my trajectory forever: Trinity funded my PhD through an Internal Graduate Studentship. I will be grateful for this throughout my career. Thanks Trinity!

My PhD years were wonderful indeed, with freedom to rove happily through ideas across the disciplines before finding my niche in modelling influenza dynamics and evolution. And I continued to enjoy being part of Trinity ‒ then among the graduate community, the BA Society.

I know many Trinity members are now on the front line of this pandemic in the UK and far beyond. I am so grateful for what they do, and I know you will all be joining me in wishing them continued strength for whatever is yet to come.