Why I got involved with InsideUni

Trinity Engineering student Areeg Emarah got involved with InsideUni at the early stages. Here she explains why. 

What is InsideUni?

It’s a student-led initiative, set up by Cambridge students Akil Hashmi and Tommy Gale in January 2018, to make university applications more accessible to everyone. Initially the focus was Cambridge and Oxford, and now it’s expanding to include advice about other leading universities.

Why did you want to get involved? 

This relates quite a bit to my background. I studied in Kenya and did not know much about Cambridge until I joined my school to do A Levels. The school had just had a student accepted for engineering at Cambridge (in fact Trinity) and my headmaster saw potential in me and suggested that I apply.

I was very lucky to have Farzana Huysman, our school’s first student at Cambridge, as a point of contact here and she reassured me about the interview and made the application process much more transparent.

So when I saw InsideUni pop up on my Facebook, I immediately thought this is precisely what every applicant needs! So I messaged Akil and asked how I could help straight away.

Apart from telling prospective applicants about the website, what else have you done for InsideUni?

Last year, I helped develop a team to write the Engineering Guide for InsideUni and promoted the project within Cambridge, particularly when it was first starting out and gaining traction.

What do you hope the project will achieve?

I really hope it will help level the playing ground for applicants. Not many people are lucky enough to know someone here and that should not be a determining factor in how their admissions process goes. I honestly think it’s already achieving lots!