Gavin left school at 16 and skipped A-levels in favour of working for a building services company
Gavin left school at 16 and skipped A-levels in favour of working for a building services company. He is working towards a master’s degree in sustainable architecture from the University of East London, while completing a bachelor’s degree in technology with the Open University. Gavin Harper is a whizz-kid on a mission. Most university students find that studying for one degree is time-consuming enough Not Gavin. I worked with many of them over the years to build what is now the Gates Scholars Community.
This began when a number of us patched together the outline for the first Gates Scholars Council. The council is in its fourth year now, and seems to be the heart of the Gates Community.” SMcC. Academically, I loved the strong collaborative atmosphere, the open attitude and free exchange of ideas. A real highlight was having my first scientific publication in a peer-reviewed journal, which I managed to squeak out within the first year, with the help of my supervisors.The Gates side of life was a unique, memorable experience. The scholars were incredibly bright, had amazing amounts of energy, and came from a wide variety of backgrounds. But, after acclimatising, the rest of my time counts among of the best years of my life. At Cambridge his research was in molecular biochemistry, focusing on immune systems.
He’s now back in the US, working as a policy adviser at the US Department of Health and Human Services, concentrating on the international dimension of bird ‘flu.”In the first three months at Cambridge, I had a bad combination of culture-shock and home-sickness. “And they’ve been brought up in a different culture: corporate identity, cheerleading, overtly competitive. That can have awful side effects, and they don’t always get it right. It doesn’t do any harm to remind people of that.”Andrew Robertson: ‘The scholars were incredibly bright – and had amazing amounts of energy’Andrew Robertson, 28, was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge between 2001 and 2005, having done a first degree, and Master’s, at the University of California, San Diego.
“Some of them (the US students) tried to use the Gates scholarship to make a name for themselves, appointing themselves as spokesmen and so on, and that was quite annoying,” she says. She’s also critical of the way in which a lunch visit by Bill Gates was handled.”He was put on a table surrounded by fellow American students, so he would feel comfortable, presumably, which seemed a lost opportunity for him as much as for anyone else.”Although these reminiscences are a few years old, Johnson does not deny that he has to guard against the American Gates scholars becoming too influential.”The Americans constitute a very large minority,” he explains. She thought the preponderance of American scholars made it difficult for the others to feel part of the community. But not every scholar leaves with an entirely positive view of this side of the Cambridge experience.Nushin Arbabzadah, who was born in Afghanistan, but educated in Germany, did an MPhil in Middle Eastern history between 2001 and 2003. “We get about 80 or 90 scholars and other interested people along to the lectures, which gives us a profile around Cambridge.”The councils organise an annual orientation camping trip for new arrivals every autumn, something that appears to have solidified the esprit de corps further. He’s responsible for organising lectures by visiting speakers.
He sees the council’s work as important for the coherence of Gates scholars during their time at Cambridge and beyond. “We play a large role in making sure that the trust, the scholars and the student body grow into something wider than just a Cambridge phenomenon,” he explains.Another council member, John Prendergast, is an engineer from Ireland, working on the influence of wind on flexible structures. A key attraction is the chance to exploit the variety of contacts offered by the university community, but efforts are also made to engender a Gates family feel.They have their own common room in a central university building and there’s a scholars’ council that organises communal events and represents individual views to the trust and the university authorities.Chairing the council is Michael Motto, from the US, who’s nearing the end of a criminology PhD, in which he’s looking at policing diversity, and focusing on the London and New York forces. However, Johnson is confident that, in time, the quality of scholars will shine through.”I know of some of our scientists who are very highly thought of, and am also aware of a former scholar who is doing some great things in the medical research field in a tropical country,” he says.At any one time, there are around 250 Gates scholars spread around the Cambridge departments and colleges.
