Jake Taylor, one of the Associate Research Fellows in AI in Science at Reuben College writes:
I went to a school in southwest London called Elliott School. It had a reputation for being an underperforming school and it failed OFSTED evaluations on multiple occasions. In my final year of sixth form, just before my final A level exams, I had to go to hospital to have lung surgery because my lungs had collapsed. At the time I didn’t realise it, but this was a blessing. I went back to school around 6 months later; however, Elliott School was now Ark Putney Academy. The Ark Academy school framework had schemes that helped underprivileged students go to university. Naturally, I applied for these programmes, and after going for an interview I found out that I had been awarded a Reuben Scholarship to study at University College London (UCL). This was a £10,000 a year award designed to help me integrate into university life without having to worry about living costs. I would not have been able to thrive at university if it were not for this scholarship. As the first person in my family to go to university, I know that my parents were extremely worried about the debt that I would take on – to the point they were looking at apprenticeships I could take up instead of going to university.
