Faculty Information
News
His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, comes to the Faculty on his final visit to Cambridge as Chancellor
Towards the end of June His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, paid his final visit to the University before standing down as Chancellor after 34 years of service. We were therefore particularly honoured that he should visit the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages on the Sidgwick Site on the morning of Thursday 23 June, in the company of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. They were greeted by the Faculty Chairman, Dr Nick White (French Dept and Emmanuel College), who led a tour of the Raised Faculty Building.
This started with a visit to the Faculty Library, where the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor met the Librarian, Dr Anne Cobby, and inspected a selection of teaching materials available to staff and students, ranging from DVDs of recent Latin American films to books on Ukrainian politics. The Chancellor showed particular interest in the Tripos exam papers which our students take and the standard they manage to reach within 4 years. On display was a recent Part II exam in which students had to translate a passage of Hemingway into French and a passage of Proust into English.
The visit culminated in a reception with some academic and administrative staff, and a dozen students from across the Faculty, ranging from first-year undergraduates on the MML Tripos and on the Linguistics Tripos to PhD students in 19th century French literature and in Italian cinema. As well as meeting the heads of our six departments, the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor also met a range of final-year undergraduates, who were awaiting their examination results. Our MML finalists explained the career paths they now planned to take, and what they had done on their Year Abroad before returning for their final year of study in Cambridge (one working for a newspaper in South America, another studying in Madrid, another working for a merchant bank in Germany, and a fourth for a NGO in French-speaking West Africa).