Student Opportunity Fund
The Department is committed to delivering excellence and innovation in teaching and research. To maintain this excellence, however, requires the Department to draw in the best and brightest students to study at Cambridge, regardless of background, and to support them in achieving their full potential once they are here. This is hugely important to the University as a whole, but it is truly vital to Geography, a discipline entirely devoted to understanding the complex relationships between people and environments.
The COVID-19 crisis has impacted the Department of Geography, and the wider University, in a number of unforeseen—and ongoing—ways. These include adapting teaching/research structures due to governmental restrictions and regulations, and responding to the difficulties with this year’s school leaving results by admitting an increased number of students in the incoming first-year cohort. We anticipate that the recovery from this historic public health crisis will take many years, and we are doing our utmost to ensure that the negative impact of this on our students is kept to a minimum, in both the short and long term. To fully support our students and their aspirations requires a degree of financial flexibility that the Department does not currently have. In response to these ongoing needs, we have established a Geography Student Opportunity Fund.
The purpose of this Fund is to:
- Provide additional financial support to enable Geography field trips, a critical part of the Tripos, to continue without imposing financial burdens on students;
- Increase our teaching capacity to meet the increased demand, and to ensure that all students receive the high quality personalised contact that has been the hallmark of the Tripos;
- Cover or offset costs related to equipment or kit that Geography students require to meet their teaching and learning needs, to ensure equality of provision across the Department;
- Cover or offset costs related to IT needs and digital content access for Geography students, especially those with financial constraints;
- Mitigate any potential future financial exigencies that directly impact students related to the Covid-19 crisis and/or other unforeseen emergencies.
A donation of any size to this fund will help to support the Department in navigating these uncharted waters, and to ensure that our students have the best Cambridge experience possible.
Next steps
Details of some of the most common ways to support the Department of Geography are listed below, but if you would like to discuss options for supporting the Department, please do contact us. We are extremely appreciative of any help that you can offer us.
- Donate online
- Donate by telephone or post
- Legacy giving – leave a gift to Cambridge Geography in your will.
If you have any questions about philanthropic giving and Cambridge Geography, please contact us.
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