̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Scholarship

Five Cambridge students named Schwarzman Scholars

sc604 — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:01 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Scholars are among 129 men and women, representing 30 countries and 75 universities, chosen for this year’s programme. This is the second year for the Schwarzman Scholars programme, which aims to educate and prepare the world’s most exceptional men and women to confront the most difficult challenges of the coming century and develop an understanding of China. ̽��ֱ��programme was founded by Blackstone Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder Stephen A Schwarzman.

̽��ֱ��five Cambridge Scholars are Zheng Guo, Ruby Holmes, Lukas Schmelter, Charles Vitry and Amos Wittenberg.

Zheng Guo received his Master’s degree in Nuclear Energy from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Bachelor’s degree in Energy and Power Systems from Tsinghua ̽��ֱ��. His research focuses on energy systems modelling, and the development of sustainable and clean energy. Zheng has published several original research papers in international journals and is a student counsellor at Tsinghua ̽��ֱ��.

Ruby Holmes graduated in 2016, having read politics and international studies at Sidney Sussex College. She is an internationally recognised debater and public speaking coach, and organised a women’s public speaking association while at Cambridge.

Lukas Schmelter is currently completing an MPhil in Modern European History at Cambridge. Parallel to his studies, he led large-scale student conferences, worked for a political think-tank focused on European integration, and completed internships in the German Bundestag, the German Foreign Ministry and the European Parliament.

Charles Vitry graduated in 2016, having read Manufacturing Engineering at St John’s College, and has attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on exchange. He has recently implemented a 30% supplier lead time reduction model at Amazon Spain and launched a factory production control system in Apple’s Soft Goods factories in China.

Amos Wittenberg, who graduated in 2015, read English Literature at Corpus Christi College, and helped set up and run the Cambridge Globalist, a student-led current affairs magazine. After graduating he spent four months as a British Council scholar in Beijing studying Chinese, and now works as a financial journalist.

“It has been truly inspiring for me to meet these people, who at such a young age have already started to make an impact on the world,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman. “Cleary their journey is just beginning, but it is our hope that the Scholars of the inaugural class, this new class, and every class thereafter will leave with a better understanding of how to foster friendship, cooperation and collaboration among the peoples of the world.”

̽��ֱ��129 Scholars were selected through a rigorous and thorough selection process designed to evaluate leadership experience and potential, intellectual and academic ability, including the capacity to understand emerging trends, design solutions, and inspire others to a vision, as well as strength of character. ̽��ֱ��applications were reviewed by a distinguished team from around the world with 300 semi-finalists invited for in-person interviews in Beijing, Bangkok, London or New York before international panels composed of CEOs, former heads of state, university presidents, non-profit executives, journalists and other leaders.

This distinguished group of interviewers who were responsible for selecting Scholars included Jared Cohen, Founder and President, Jigsaw, Alphabet Inc, David Petraeus, Former Director of the CIA, Brian Mulroney, Former Prime Minister of Canada, Jeremy Wright, Attorney General for England and Wales, Shelly Lazarus, Chairman Emeritus of Ogilvy & Mather, Rona Fairhead, Chairman of the BBC Trust, Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte, Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, and many others.

Robert Garris, Global Director of Admissions said, “As we met the candidates for the second class of Scholars during their interviews, we were impressed with their unparalleled energy, initiative, and drive. We confirmed once again how essential it is to have experienced leaders from politics, the non-profit world, and government as panellists, meeting the candidates in person to identify the next generation of leaders.”

̽��ֱ��scholarship is fully funded for all participants, including travel costs and a personal stipend, and is supported by the programme’s endowment which is expected to total $450 million, with $435 million raised to date. Scholars will live and study together at Schwarzman College, the dedicated state-of-the-art academic and residential building built exclusively for the programme.

Scholars will study Public Policy, Economics & Business, and International Studies, and spend a year immersed in an international community of thinkers, innovators and senior leaders in business, politics and society.

Five Cambridge students are among this year’s Schwarzman Scholars, a highly selective programme which supports students from around the world to complete a one-year Master’s degree programme at Tsinghua ̽��ֱ�� in Beijing, one of China’s top universities.

Schwarzman Scholars

L-R: Zheng Guo, Ruby Holmes, Lukas Schmelter, Charles Vitry, Amos Witternberg

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

2013 National Scholarship Programme Awards made

sj387 — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 10:58:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��students, from families with an income of less than £25,000, have each been awarded the £6,000 as a fee waiver. This is in addition to their Cambridge Bursary of £3,500.

̽��ֱ��NSP is run jointly by the Government scheme and the universities. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has chosen to give priority for NSP awards to care leavers, to students who were in receipt of free school meals, and to lone parents.

Geography student Katie was one of 136 students awarded support from the NSP in 2012.

"I'm the first in my family to go to university,” Katie explained. “I know that I don't have to pay fees back until I graduate but it was still a worry for my parents.

“Thanks to the NSP fee waiver I am borrowing less and they are more relaxed about me studying for a degree,” Katie added.

“By taking part in the NSP, we hope to provide additional reassurance to students from low-income families that taking up a place at Cambridge is affordable,” said Dr Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College, and the Chair of the NSP panel that considered applications.

“We are particularly pleased to have been able to make an award to every student accepted this year who has been on free school meals, and to every care leaver,” Dr Fara added.

“In order to encourage students from all backgrounds to apply, the ̽��ֱ�� provides a generous and flexible financial support package, including the NSP,” commented Director of Undergraduate Recruitment, Jon Beard.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has made 295 National Scholarship Programme awards to support students from low-income families starting at the university this year. Over 50 of these grants were made to students who had previously claimed Free School Meals.

By taking part in the NSP, we hope to provide additional reassurance to students from low-income families that taking up a place at Cambridge is affordable

Dr Patricia Fara

Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

CS Lewis: 50 years after his death a new scholarship will honour his literary career

sj387 — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��author CS Lewis, best known to the general public for his children’s classics ̽��ֱ��Chronicles of Narnia, died 50 years ago on 22 November. He was much more than a children’s author: he was also a brilliant scholar, holding prestigious academic positions first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, as well as an influential Christian thinker.

In 1954, Lewis was awarded the chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a post that was founded with him in mind. In order to support research in that broad field of Lewis’s interests, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is in the process of establishing a CS Lewis Scholarship that will help to fund an outstanding graduate student.

Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey at a ceremony on the anniversary of his death. His memorial will join those of some of the most famous names in English literature including poets Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth, playwrights Marlowe, Shakespeare and Wilde, and novelists Austen, Lawrence and Thackeray.

̽��ֱ��CS Lewis Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey will take place at noon on Friday, 22 November and will be open to all those who have requested tickets. A collection at the service will be dedicated to the CS Lewis Scholarship.

̽��ֱ��current chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge is Professor Helen Cooper. Like Lewis’s, her work emphasises the continuity of literature across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Early in her career she studied pastoral literature from the late Classical period to Milton. Her more recent books include one on romance, from its invention in the 12th century to the death of Shakespeare, and another on Shakespeare’s debt to the Middle Ages. She has also published extensively on the Canterbury Tales.

“Scholarship – reading, lecturing, critical writing and teaching – was CS Lewis’s day job. He came to devotional writing and fiction, whether for children or adults, quite late in his life, and although he is now more widely known for those than for his critical work, it’s not because they are necessarily better or more important,” said Professor Cooper.

“From the moment of its publication in 1936, Lewis’s Allegory of Love transformed how medieval studies might be approached. ̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

“Lewis described his empathy with such lost ways of thinking by casting himself as ‘Old Western Man’, the equivalent of a surviving dinosaur who embodied what the age of the dinosaurs was like, and so could teach things that more conventional academic processes could not.”

As a child growing up in Northern Ireland, Lewis was enthralled by the myths and legends of Norse, Greek and Celtic literature. ̽��ֱ��young Lewis (known as Jack throughout his life) and his brother Warren invented a make-believe world called Boxen which was ruled by animals. Lewis fell in love with the landscape of the Mountains of Mourne which he said later inspired him to write the Narnia books.

Lewis’s deep interest in the bold universal themes that are woven into ancient, medieval and early modern literature endured throughout his life. His novels and poems draw on his extensive knowledge of texts such as ̽��ֱ��Voyage of St Brendan (which underlies ̽��ֱ��Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and the early Grail romances (which inspired That Hideous Strength). At Oxford ̽��ֱ��, where he read English Literature, he proved to be an outstanding student and, on graduating with a triple first, went on to teach there for more than 30 years.

Much of Lewis’s non-fiction writing deals with broad religious and spiritual questions, from the problem of evil to miracles. He was brought up in the Church of Ireland but as a teenager became an atheist. At Oxford, where he remained for most of his adult life, Lewis was part of a literary group nicknamed the Inklings, which included Tolkien. During this time, and influenced by his friends, he reluctantly re-embraced Christianity. In 1949 he wrote his first children’s novel, ̽��ֱ��Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which can be read as a fantasy adventure story and as an allegory for Christ’s crucifixion.

Professor Cooper commented: “ ̽��ֱ��power of myth and legend that Lewis had discovered as a child helps to drive the Narnia books. ̽��ֱ��myths might be Greek or Norse or Christian – the last a myth that ‘really happened’, as he came to believe – and the legends might be Arthurian; but he had the gift of conveying something of their deep imaginative hold through his stories of children travelling in strange worlds, of talking animals and of battles against evil.”

̽��ֱ��year that Lewis became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge saw the publication of his third (originally fifth) and eagerly awaited Narnia novel, ̽��ֱ��Horse and His Boy.

“At Cambridge Lewis was taken to represent a diametrically opposite mode of criticism from that of his contemporary FR Leavis, and undergraduates often aligned themselves behind one or the other. But despite their disagreements, Lewis expressed his admiration for Leavis’s powers as a critic,” said Professor Cooper. “Lewis’s belief in the importance of historical contextualisation was in many ways ahead of its time. That alertness to context included his recognition of the centrality of God in the medieval and early modern world. His lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, like his earlier work on Milton, demanded that even atheist readers should start by understanding what each poet was attempting to do, and that included their reflection of, and on, the religion of their own age.”

Lewis worked in Cambridge for nine years. In August 1963, having discovered that he was terminally ill, he resigned his chair. He died in his home in Oxford and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington. News of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of JF Kennedy.

Professor Helen Cooper is the sixth scholar, and second female scholar, to hold the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Like Lewis, she holds it in conjunction with a fellowship at Magdalene College.

Inset images from top: Magdalene College, jefurii (via Flickr), Keir Hardie (via Flickr)

CS Lewis, creator of some of the most-loved children’s stories and also a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, died half a century ago on 22 November. A scholarship to be set up in his name will support an outstanding graduate to study at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

Professor Helen Cooper

GeeJo via Wikimedia

̽��ֱ��Searcher, a statue of CS Lewis by sculptor, Ross Wilson, at Holywood Arches Library in Belfast

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Announcement of the Prathiba M Singh Cambridge Scholarship

sj387 — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:05:51 +0000

After successfully completing her LLM and working for many years as a lawyer in India, Singh is now the managing partner of Singh & Singh Law Firm in New Delhi, started with her husband in 1997, something she never could have imagined when she was embarking on her Masters in 1992. She is now a registered patent and trademark attorney, with areas of practice including patent, trademark, copyright and design litigation, and hopes to help other young Indian students achieve their goals through this scholarship.

Singh, who completed her Bachelor of Law degree at Bangalore ̽��ֱ��, undertook a Masters of Law degree at Cambridge in 1992 on a full scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and then returned to India to work in Intellectual Property. This endowment, the Prathiba M Singh Cambridge Scholarship, will enable exceptional law students to follow in her academic and professional footsteps. A substantial part of her work consists of Intellectual Property disputes, and she is considered as one of India's leading IP litigators.

She has handled and argued a large number of landmark cases in India including the Novartis case. With more than 150 reported precedents to her credit, and achievements including the Euromoney Asia Women in Business Law Awards 2012 for the Best Woman IP Litigator in Asia, such a reputation is well deserved. Her firm has also been hailed as the Firm of the Year at the 2013 Managing IP Global Awards for IP Contentious work in India.

"This scholarship is the first step to make a contribution to the legal profession and give back what I got when I studied in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. I hope meritorious Indian students avail this to do an LLM with focus on IPR laws and return to India. ̽��ֱ��purpose is to encourage young bright lawyers to join litigation practice."

̽��ֱ��Faculty of Law has long been known for the high quality of its teaching; since its foundation 700 years ago, when graduates would regularly attain the highest judicial positions in Europe, it has continually produced exemplary students of outstanding legal calibre.

Applicants for this scholarship should be talented students currently residing in India, in need of financial assistance to study at Cambridge, and intending to pursue a legal career in India after graduation. Because of Singh's professional specialisation, applicants must have a strong and genuine interest in studying Intellectual Property Law.

̽��ֱ��application deadline is 15th November 2013, for study in 2014-14. Visit the Faculty of Law website or the Cambridge Trust website for more information.

Prathiba M Singh, an Indian alumna of the Faculty of Law, has donated a scholarship that will allow other Indian students to complete an LLM at the world-renowned Cambridge Faculty of Law.

̽��ֱ��purpose is to encourage young bright lawyers to join litigation practice

Prathiba M Singh

Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes