Hiranya Peiris
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.