Sophie Hermanns, a Gates Cambridge Scholar

After studying at Sciences Po as an exchange student in the European Affairs Master programme, Sophie Hermanns applied for a PhD at the University of Cambridge. She was recently awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, a prestigious scholarship given to outstanding students who demonstrate leadership potential and are committed to improving the lives of others. Interview.

• The Gates Cambridge Scholarship is awarded to outstanding students that meet four criteria. One of them is the applicant’s commitment to improve the lives of others. Can you tell us about how you plan to show this commitment to others?

That’s actually something I’ve been trying very hard to figure out for a long time now! As an undergrad, I joined Giving What We Can, a meta-charity dedicated to researching how we can ‘do the most good’. They encourage people to donate a significant portion of their income – typically 10 per cent –  to the most cost-effective charities fighting world poverty. That’s how I started researching global health interventions in the first place, which I’ll now write my PhD on! 

What drew me to Giving What We Can was that they argued that we owe more than just sympathy to those who are worse off than us, more than just throwing some money into a donation box around Christmas and buying fair trade chocolate. That we owe others to think hard and long about how we can improve their lives most effectively. So there isn’t one particular thing I do – I’ve pledged some of my income to charity and have worked, volunteered and interned with NGOs and development think tanks – but what matters to me is not just to do something to improve the lives of others, but to also think about the effectiveness of what I’m doing.

• What made you decide to do a PhD?

One thing that was very important to me when I decided whether or not to apply for a PhD was that my research topic should be interesting to me as well as to others, that it should have some purpose beyond my own entertainment. Not that I don’t care about being entertained! I don’t think I could write a good PhD on a topic I’m not genuinely passionate about. But I’d also be uncomfortable using the resources of Cambridge and the Gates scholarship just for my own amusement. So I hope my PhD will be more than that.

• You went to Cambridge for your undergraduate degree. What is it like to be a student there, in and out of the classroom?

As much as I just talked about making careful, evidence-based decision, I actually hadn’t really researched Cambridge at all and mostly applied because I imagined it was the closest thing I could find to Hogwarts. Which turned out to be true, sort of. I was really happy there as an undergraduate. I had brilliant and incredibly supportive teachers, the library served tea during exam term and I got to wear a wizard robe (‘academic gown’) about once a week.