Painting Pictures of Everyday People: Five Key Lessons from Life After Girton
I am honoured to be with you all today in this iconic dining hall. As I learned when I first arrived here aged 18, being a Girtonian means being part of a rich tradition of innovation and progress. Girtonians have a formidable reputation in the outside world. We are hardened by our character building daily 5 mile bike ride up Castle Hill. We count the first ever female Supreme Court justice Brenda Hale, Indian independence campaigner Sarojini Naidu, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and television presenter Sandi Toksvig amongst our ranks. And very unusually for a Cambridge college, when you look around the walls of the college, you will see, as I did when I first arrived, pictures of everyday people.
In fact, there is one such picture that especially jumps out at me nowadays. Rajesh Patel is depicted, a shop owner pictured inside his newsagents shop, with his wife and his daughter. Like my parents, Rajesh was born in East Africa. Like his daughter, I grew up in the newsagents, corner shops, pharmacies and post offices that many members of my family ran.
This living exhibition has grown year on year since I left, and the diversity of life represented on the walls of this college I feel, has seeped into my consciousness. Even today, I am always keen to see what new portraits have been added to the collection when I return.
I remember the first time I came to Girton, which was interview day. The taxi driver took us the long way around and I had just sat in the chair in the Stanley Library when my timed formal logic exam started. I suppose it meant that I didn’t have any time to get any nerves or feel remotely intimidated by my surroundings. I survived the exam and I also survived the interview that followed. And obviously, I stand here in front of you today as an alumni, so it wasn’t a terrible performance after all! Looking back, I realise that the skill of adapting quickly was to be extremely useful in the years to come.
I had a wonderful time at Girton, I made amazing friends who are like my family today. I belonged to a supportive community of Cambridge philosophers, and I was certainly an academic success. In 2008, I had secured a double first class degree and had ranked third in the year in Philosophy, one of Cambridge’s most challenging courses. But looking back, I benefited almost as much from the conversations I had with my peers on my daily lunch and dinnertimes in this hall. Because college life isn’t at all about your subject, but connecting with those beyond your subject, I learned so much more, about economics, finance and markets, about the latest legal developments, about politics and history, art, science and technology, geography and literature. I helped organise a production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and I was on the Girton Spring Ball organisation committee when I was here. It was impossible not to connect and talk with a wide variety of my peers as I walked through these narrow corridors. These brief interactions left me with skills that aren’t merely on an academic piece of paper, that I use every day today and for that I am very grateful.
But I have been asked to tell you about life after Girton. It has been 20 years since I matriculated here. What did I then go on to do with this degree in Philosophy and a very useful grounding in other matters here at Girton? I became, in a way, a painter of everyday people. In more grounded terms, I am a social researcher with expertise in the use of participatory methods, an artificial intelligence researcher, and a serial founder of interesting social impact initiatives. After a rocky start in the real world due to the 2008 financial crisis, I took a job in public policy and government. I found myself gravitating towards working for a wide range of think tanks , surfacing what people felt and thought about all sorts of complex issues. At the Royal Society of Arts I persuaded the Bank of England to create regional citizen economic panels to engage everyday people on issues of economic policy. Alongside this, I also moonlighted as a councillor, where I spoke on behalf of and advocated for many members of the public for 8 years. I co-founded a community run library reclaimed from closure. And I co-founded the Ada Lovelace Institute, one of the world’s leading AI research institutes. More broadly, I work closely with many partners at the global level, ensuring that ordinary people can influence decision making by running citizen juries and citizen assemblies. My next big project this year is to implement and execute the Global Citizens Assembly, one of the first international institutions of its kind.
Why does this painting of everyday people matter you might ask? I would like to bring things back full circle to Girton and the type of education I received here outside of the lecture hall, which encouraged me to think and learn broadly, towards really interrogating questions and issues in a deeper way. This is the model of education that should be available to everyone, at all times, not just at the start of their life.
So from this informal education I want to share, with you and with the wider world, five key lessons I learned.
One of these lessons began early in life, in the newsagents, post offices and the cornershops of modern Britain. I learned that it takes a village to raise a child and a community to do the really difficult things in life. Those of us here today, however brilliant, rely on the hard work and sacrifices of generations who have come before us, and very few of us have single handedly created our own life chances and success. For that reason I think the Girton community is something special. What networks and communities have made you who you are?
Another lesson is the value of a vision and execution of that vision. Dream big and get it done. Nothing difficult is ever done without a vision, a belief that it is possible and a clear plan and strategy to realise that vision. Someone built this building with a vision to transform women’s education and they followed through. The result has changed the lives of many people and made the impossible possible. What vision do you have? How will you get it done?
A third lesson was navigating change in an uncertain world. Adapt, move quickly, respond and look for signals and feedback loops. Things will not go to plan as with the wayward taxi driver before my interview. It’s how you react and respond that matters. As Morgan Housel writes, plan on your plan not going according to plan. How are you responding to the signals of change in an uncertain world?
Fourth, keep learning. There’s literally life outside Girton. Education doesn’t end at school or at Girton, it is a lifelong pursuit. And no matter how hard the problem, in most cases the answer to your question has often been found before, by someone else. You just need to know how to find it and look outside the narrowness of your own discipline or domain. Are you creating time every day for your own development and learning? Are you really looking everywhere you can for that knowledge you need?
The fifth, and final lesson came from the discipline and the method of reading philosophy here. I learned that in many cases, it wasn’t knowing the answers but the ability to ask a good question that really matters. And so, as I conclude, I would like to present to you this last and final question.
In your life going forward, and with the skills, knowledge and resources you have at your disposal, what pictures will you paint of everyday people?
Thank you Girton.
