In addition to the 22 Somerville students who were awarded Principal’s Prizes in September 2017, the following students have now received Principal’s Prizes for their work in graduate degrees completed in 2017:
Philip Behrens (MSc Water Science, Policy and Management)
Qixuan Feng (MSc Computer Science)
Jean-Francois Ton (MSc Applied Statistics)
Fan Wu (MSc Applied Statistics)
Principal’s Prizes are awarded to those students (undergraduate and graduate) who scored in the top 10% or better of their University-wide subject cohort, and/or to those gaining top marks for a dissertation or project or in a particular set of papers. Each prize is worth £250 and is awarded in addition to University or departmental prizes.
Prizewinner Fan Wu (pictured above) studied Mathematics and Economics at the University of Bonn before coming to Somerville to read for the MSc in Applied Statistics. He is now part of a doctoral training programme jointly run by Oxford and Warwick universities. Fan has fond memories of living and working at Somerville during his MSc. ‘The MCR was a great place to go, with its TV, games, foosball table and, most importantly, incredibly nice people’ he says, and he also enjoyed studying in the library (and, in summer, on the lawn as well!).
For Fan, Somerville is an example of ‘an institution that worked for me and not against me’, helping him with accommodation during the summer vacation and with gathering the documents he needed to secure funding. ‘People were always very helpful and everything was very smooth,’ he says, ‘which I don’t think can be taken for granted.’ He is especially grateful to have been part of such a strong graduate cohort, both in the MSc and in Somerville, and he recalls ‘(too) many all-nighters when we had projects, not because it was necessary to get the work done, but because we all had too much fun just chatting, playing chess and getting the occasional kebab!’