Over the winter Semester break, fourteen St Andrew’s College third-year students joined us on our first inaugural two-week intensive course at Cambridge University on ‘The Making of the Modern World’.
As one of our students, Annabelle King (Fr 2024) put it, “This truly was the trip of a lifetime. There was a perfect balance between study and leisure, allowing us to explore the amazing city of Cambridge together.”
Staying at Queens’ College (founded in 1448), our students studied seminal texts and ideas that have shaped the world we live in today. They learned in small-group seminars from world-leading scholars across a range of humanities disciplines, including history, literature, and politics.
Faculty from Cambridge University to teach on the course included award-winning historian, Professor Clare Jackson, who lectured on James VI and I and the making of Great Britain; and Professor Michael Hurley who delivered seminars on Modern poetry, sense-making and stupidity. Dr Daniel Hanigan, an alumnus of St Andrew’s, now a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught on the subject of cartography in the ancient world. Students then worked on their own essays which they discussed and extended in a Cambridge-style supervision. Overall, they participated in the seminars with intelligence and enthusiasm and engaged thoughtfully with the reading and teaching. The course concluded with a Formal Dinner in the Old Combination Room at Queens’.
Other highlights of the course included a guided tour of the Fitzwilliam Museum, a walking tour of Cambridge, punting on the River Cam and a visit to the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge where the group encountered Shakespeare’s First Folio, John Locke’s copy of Newton’s Principia, a first edition of Frankenstein, and one of Tennyson’s manuscript notebooks; not to mention the manuscript draft of Winnie the Pooh.
Our students, characteristically, made the most of the opportunity, and as Annabelle also highlighted, “part of the beauty of the trip was the unique friendship group that formed away from the distractions of college.” The Cambridge Intensive was a remarkable educational experience, which stretched and challenged these excellent students and, in many cases, has raised their aspirations for future study.
