Hiranya Peiris

So my mother got a job in Manchester.

We had to make do on my mother's salary, basically.

So we watched the pennies.

And, you know, I was 16 in a new country.

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.