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IVORY TOWERS THOMAS COPE
IVORY TOWERS
BY THOMAS COPE (93-03)
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I joined RGS Junior School at age eight from a state primary school, and was immediately propelled from top of the class to the bottom. I caught up within a year, but I always remember this experience when I greet new students to Cambridge.
Imposter syndrome hits almost everyone when they come up, but as an 18 year old I was convinced that I had been allowed in to read medicine at Gonville and Caius by the most colossal of administrative errors, and that I would be found out at any moment.
Not having studied biology A Level, I was playing catch-up to my peers for the first term. I remember one small-group teaching session in which my supervisor, a professor of physiology, incredulously disabused me of the notion that the pulse represented active contraction of the arteries to aid the circulation. However, just as RGS had done for me before, Cambridge expanded my horizons and offered me opportunity I couldn’t have imagined.
Imposter syndrome usually lifts after a term or so, and by second year it’s clear – if we chose you and you work hard, you’re good enough for Cambridge.
As a schoolboy, I most looked forward to science lessons. I remember the opening of the Science and Technology Centre (STC) in 1997, when I was in Year 8, and what a marvel it seemed in contrast to the wood-panelled Victorian building it replaced. I was offered my first teaching opportunities in that building as part of the Newcastle Science Enrichment Programme, where on a Saturday we would open the STC to students from local schools without such world-class facilities. This sowed the seeds for the widening participation work I would do as a medical student, and eventually my current role in a Cambridge college.
RGS afforded me opportunities to stretch myself far beyond the curriculum, and encouraged me to indulge my academically competitive spirit. In Year 10, I was part of the school chemistry team that won the regional competition and came second in the national RSC challenge. The team captain Angus McKnight (91-01) (then Year 11, now an anaesthetist) went on to read medicine at the same Cambridge college as I did. In Year 11 I was encouraged through the rounds of the intermediate maths challenge, and spent an inspirational week at maths camp in Birmingham. But the most life-changing of these opportunities came in Upper Sixth thanks to Ned Rispin, who is still at RGS after all of these years. I did well in the first round of the British Physics Olympiad, which was taken by all of the Sixth Form studying physics, and five of us were invited to enter the second round. I remember Mr Rispin’s increasing amusement as I continued to do well and was rewarded with: another physics test, and another, and another. Eventually I was invited to a training camp in Oxford to choose the British team for the international physics Olympiad. I say that this was life-changing, not because I made the team – I did not, on this occasion my imposter syndrome was justified – but because it was on that camp I first met the spectacular woman who was to become my wife. We read medicine together at Cambridge, and she is now a histopathologist researching breast cancer. Although I had a brief dalliance with the idea of reading economics, thanks to the truly inspirational teaching of Geoff Riley (88-00) and Johnny Neil, I was always destined to read medicine. Medicine provides a vocation for the scientist, but it also opens up an unrivalled range of opportunity. For the practically minded, it offers a direct opportunity to make a difference on a daily basis. For the socially minded, it affords a unique and intimate insight into the lives of others as they experience or endure moments of unmatched joy and sorrow. For the academically minded, it provides both confidence of purpose and clarity of vision.
I have been lucky to be able to combine the practical with the theoretical. I write this as I near the end of a redeployment to the front lines as part of the coronavirus response. However, from August I will retreat back to my ivory tower, where I use advanced forms of neuroimaging (especially magnetoencephalography, positron emission tomography and ultra-high field (7T) functional MRI) to study how the brain and mind go wrong in patients with neurological pathology. Alongside this I teach neuroscience and human behaviour to medical students and direct studies for psychology and neuroscience at Murray Edwards College, where I am a Fellow. One of the things I find most rewarding is nurturing the next generation of medical students from imposter to leader, as RGS did for me.
