Hi, I’m Neve, the Access Officer for the Gonville and Caius Student Union this year, and I am studying English here at Caius!

It’s a great honour to have been elected into the position of Access Officer, and I hope to encourage as many people as possible from underrepresented backgrounds to apply to University, specifically Cambridge, and more specifically Caius.

Caius has a really welcoming environment, perhaps aided by the great diversity of people here. It’s a great college that does brilliant work in access and outreach (it is thanks to this work that I applied here!) and I am excited to continue to open up access to Cambridge to other people from underrepresented backgrounds.

While I love the town in which I grew up, it is widely considered a significantly deprived area, and so I have personal experience of the barriers that keep people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds from applying to and attending universities (especially top universities like Cambridge).  Access to higher education is crucial to upward social mobility, and I believe that there is so much talent amongst underrepresented groups that never gets to flourish in academia due to the perceived inaccessibility of university.

My email address is jcraccess@cai.cam.ac.uk . Please do contact me if you have ANY questions about Access or Outreach and I’ll be very happy to help.