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‘Tammy Chen Fund a “Godsend”’

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The Tammy Chen Postgraduate Studentship is transforming the lives of postgraduates at Caius.

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One of the first recipients of the Tammy Chen Postgraduate Studentship says she would have probably quit the University of Cambridge, had it not been for the support she obtained from Caius.

Tiéphaine Thomason (History 2017) says the help she received during her undergraduate study at Gonville & Caius College was “pretty amazing” — and getting the funding to study for an MPhil in Early Modern History was “an absolute godsend”. Tiéphaine said: “I’d had a bit of an odd second year, and applied with my grades from then. I ended up getting a starred first in my third year, topping the College for History. Getting funding meant that I could do the MPhil work and that my grades from third year were acknowledged.”

The Tammy Chen Postgraduate Studentship provides financial support to postgraduate students studying Humanities subjects at Caius. It was established in memory of Tammy Chen, a PhD candidate at Caius killed in a terrorist attack in Burkina Faso in August 2017. Tiéphaine says she felt humbled to receive funding from such tragic circumstances. Had the bursary not come through, she would have had to defer her studies.

Tiéphaine ended up getting the joint-highest MPhil grade in her cohort, and was jointly awarded the Members' History Prize for the best MPhil dissertation in Early Modern History submitted in 2020/21. She largely credited the support she received from the College, particularly her Directors of Studies Prof Peter Mandler and Dr Melissa Calaresu. She says: “The College has been so supportive in every single way. I would not have made it through Cambridge at all, had it not been for Caius.”

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“The College has been so supportive in every single way. I would not have made it through Cambridge at all, had it not been for Caius.”

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One of her most surreal memories of College was during the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020, towards the end of her third year and going into her MPhil year. Tiéphaine says: “The whole University was in the ‘red phase’, which meant that everyone had gone home, apart from a select group of us, who couldn’t go home.”

She adds that being cut off from their families was a “very odd” experience, and thanked Senior Tutor Dr Andrew Spencer for his support during this strange period. Tiéphaine says: “In my case, my dad lives in Hong Kong. You couldn’t fly back to Hong Kong during that time. The same with a few friends of mine. We were all revising for exams, so that’s quite intense. Town was absolutely silent during this period. It was a very eerie feeling but it was also very exciting because you were left in an empty Cambridge to your own devices.” The students relaxed by having sing-a-longs to Simon & Garfunkel songs in the evenings and cooking international meals from their home countries, using the limited ingredients available at the time.

Growing up in Hong King, Singapore and Zurich, Tiéphaine, who is half-French, half-English, said she was “sent to the UK to straighten out my English” at the age of thirteen, having previously studied in French. Becoming a boarder at Oakham School in Rutland, one of England’s smallest counties, was a culture shock, so finding a multicultural community at Caius was a big relief, she says. She adds: “Caius itself is a wonderful environment, we’re one of the few colleges with very regular formals in the evenings, which means we go to them quite casually. When you go to formals at other colleges, people are always dressed in a very fancy way, whereas at Caius we’re all desperately trying not to get tomato soup on our gowns.”

She also enjoyed helping out in the College Archives and now volunteers through mentorship schemes such as Zero Gravity and Insight Outreach, encouraging other students to apply to university.

Tiéphaine has a final message to those who contributed towards her bursary, saying: “Thank you so much for all the support that you give to Caius and to students here. It makes a real impact and difference to our lives and on the future careers that we can have and hopefully we’ll be able to give something back at some point through the research that we do or what we end up producing.”

Tiéphaine recently discovered that she has been successful in receiving full funding from the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarships Programme to study for a PhD in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, based at Murray Edwards College, from 2022/23. There, she will be looking at the spread of spoken French across the early modern Francophone Atlantic. While the College is sorry to see Tiéphaine leave, we know she will stay in touch with the fellows and students at Caius.

Outstanding students like Tiéphaine continue to require funding, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, for which financial support is increasingly difficult to access. The appointment of Dr Calaresu as the new Deputy Senior Tutor for Postgraduates is indicative of the College directing focus on our postgraduate community and creating additional sources of funding to attract the best postgraduate students.

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written up by Tali Iserles | ‘Once a Caian’, Issue 22, p. 355 (15 November 2022) | ‘Caius News’ (22 May 2022)