Life before Somerville | 51
Life before Somerville Suzanne Heywood (née Cook) came up to read Zoology at Somerville in 1987. In 1993 she received a PhD from King’s College, Cambridge before joining HM Treasury as a fast stream trainee. She is now a Director (senior partner) at McKinsey & Co and is also on the Boards of the Royal Opera House and Royal Academy of Music. She lives in London with her husband Jeremy and their three children. See photograph at page 70. I remember the day of my Somerville interview very clearly. I had never been to Oxford and had felt rather daunted walking into the college the night before. In advance of getting there I had not really thought about what it would be like or how others would see me. But on the morning of my interview I was very conscious – as only a teenage girl can be – of how different I looked, wearing my long, pleated, blue wool skirt that I had made myself (and had been very proud of back in New Zealand) and clutching a photograph album full of pictures of whales and dolphins I had taken myself off the side of our boat. Although I felt different I don’t think I realised – perhaps luckily – quite how different I was. I quickly discovered that the first question everyone asked was ‘Where did you go to school?’ The answer – ‘I didn’t – I grew up on a boat’ – rarely elicited further questioning, just baffled looks from my peers. Looking back, the fact that I was at Somerville for that interview, with at least some of the right qualifications, is almost incredible. A year before it had looked far less likely. At that time I was living with my younger brother Jon in a small holiday house an hour’s drive from Rotorua – a Suzanne Heywood and family on board Wavewalker