Hiranya Peiris
speaker
454 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 25 May
Hiranya Peiris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I started in a new school and I'd previously learned in my native language, Sinhalese.
It was a mixed school.
And for the first time in my life, I found that I was a minority in maths and science class.
And suddenly people just assumed girls couldn't do these subjects.
I did, actually.
The teachers were really good.
There was a teacher called Dr Egan, and he was my further maths teacher.
And he gave me university-level textbooks, and he encouraged me to apply to Cambridge.
It felt like a really unattainable goal.
But when he told me that I could do it, I didn't know anything about Cambridge.
So I applied to a college.
It's called Newhall at the time, now Murray Edwards.
And there's a very iconic dome, which is suggestive of an observatory dome.
And that's the reason I picked that college.
We were not well off.
And at that time, computer science was one of those subjects that was held to have very good career prospects.
I remember applying to so many different jobs and I accumulated the rejection letters in a binder.
I still have that somewhere to remind me that rejection is OK.
Eventually, I got into a scheme called the Ear in Industry at Nuclear Electric, which ran the UK's nuclear reactors at the time.
And I was placed in a team which was monitoring the turbo generator system for cracks and
Showing 321–340 of 454 · page 17 of 23
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