Admissions

Dr Christopher Burlinson, President and Admissions Tutor

Jesus College ’ s Admissions Office plays a fundamental part in our educational mission, and the admissions process is a painstaking and meticulous one. Every year we get applications from around 1,000 students from the UK and beyond (977 in 2021-22, 904 in the previous year), and interview the great majority of them in December. It’ s our job to select the students with the greatest potential to flourish at Cambridge, regardless of their educational, financial, ethnic or religious background. More broadly, we ’ re committed to playing our part in the University ’ s Outreach and Widening Participation work, raising the aspirations of students from across the UK to study at Cambridge (and other universities like it), and making sure that students from all backgrounds are equipped and prepared to make competitive applications if they decide they want to study here. We have always looked for academic potential in our applicants and will continue to do so; but we also want to ensure that our field of applicants is as broad and diverse as it possibly can be, and to recognise that excellent students from different backgrounds might show their potential in very different ways.

At Jesus, this work is overseen by three Admissions Tutors, currently me, Professor Claire Fenton-Glynn, and Dr Matthew Harper; Professors Geoff Parks and Shailaja Fennell have stood in at different points during the 2021-22 year. They form a team with our Admissions Co-ordinator, Rachel Chiodo, and Schools Liaison Officer (SLO), Molly Wilson-Smith (who took over from Katie Mountford in the summer of 2022). Our SLO oversees our links with schools and colleges across the country and manages the day-to-day running of outreach events. The final part of our team is equally important: dozens of Undergraduate Ambassadors, all of them current or recently graduated students from the College, who are often the first point of contact for students and prospective applicants visiting the College, and often best placed to persuade these students that they should consider applying to Cambridge or to Jesus College, and that they would thrive here.

This work pays off. Our most recent cohorts of students have been increasingly diverse, with around 75-80 per cent of our UK-educated students coming from state schools, a growing number from parts of the country with greater economic disadvantage or lower rates of participation in higher education, and more than ever before from ethnic and religious minority (ERM) backgrounds. And these are more than just figures: the diversity of our student body is something that the entire community of Jesus College benefits from, and something that we celebrate. We ’ re proud of the work that we have done in recent years to increase this diversity, and we are committed to continuing it – reaching schools and potential students from all backgrounds and all areas of the country.

Currently, the University ’ s Area Links Scheme assigns each College to particular areas of the country; Jesus College collaborates particularly with schools and colleges from Tyne and Wear and from the London boroughs of Ealing, Brent, and Westminster, and with some schools from Peterborough. We don ’t work exclusively with these schools and colleges, but the scheme means that we ’ re often their first point of contact in Cambridge, and often the first taste of Cambridge life and university study for their students. A lot of our Outreach and Widening Participation events focus on these schools, and throughout the year we ’ re visited by groups (from Year 9 and Year 10 upwards, sometimes much younger than that) from these areas. In January, a group of Jesus students travel to Tyne and Wear for a tour of schools in that region, meeting several hundred teachers

and students over the course of a busy week. Over Easter, as part of the University ’ s HE+ scheme, groups of students from the north-east visit Jesus for a residential event with academic taster sessions. Then, in July, we host further residentials for Year 10 students from London and the north-east (when we can talk about GCSEs, A-Level choices, and study skills, and more generally raise aspirations about studying at a university like Cambridge) and Year 12 students from those areas (helping to demystify and explain the application process). And finally, in September, we receive groups of Year 13 students from our link areas who are on the point of applying to Cambridge or other universities, and make sure that they are properly prepared for that process.

This is a busy programme, but the pandemic has made us realise how important it is –and how important that we continue to develop it. COVID-19 brought changes to our admissions process: all our interviews, for example, now take place online. But it also changed how we could engage with potential students; for much of the two years after March 2020, we could only meet these students online. This did bring some small advantages: some online events, for instance, can make it easier for students from different parts of the country to meet us and hear from us. But we missed the personal contact with potential students and the opportunity to show them around the College; and we realised, too, that we needed to work doubly hard to support and encourage potential applicants who had been isolated during the pandemic. Our challenge now is to make sure that we take forward the lessons that we ’ ve learned over the last two years. We are working on subject-focussed events and masterclasses for Year 12 students, which we began online in the summer of 2020. And we want to develop more events in the coming year for students from ERM backgrounds, to complement and contribute to the work of organisations like Target Oxbridge. We continue to rely on the support of our academic and non-academic staff (including the Fellows and College Post-doctoral Associates who come to these events to talk about their research), and to all our undergraduate and postgraduate students who contribute to them. Our aim remains to inspire prospective students about the thrill of academic study, and about the prospect of coming to Cambridge and studying at Jesus College. n

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