King’s set me up for Cambridge

Case studies

Nandini Shiralkar, 22, left King’s Maths School in 2020, and completed a master’s in engineering at Cambridge this year. 

In her first year at university, she founded the Existential Risk Alliance fellowship, an initiative uniting an exceptional cohort of early-career researchers from a dozen countries to tackle challenges such as AI safety. Since 2021 she has raised more than £2.5 million and is executive director of the initiative. 

She said that the school had “set a bar for intellectual curiosity and love of learning which is hard to match anywhere else. It was about developing a mindset of rigorous, truth-seeking analysis that now applies to everything in my life. And to be honest, I found myself missing that environment and intensity even while I was at Cambridge. This reinforced my commitment to empowering others in kind. I have tutored and mentored younger students, especially girls.’’

Now she plans to take a PhD focusing on the “intersection of computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence and build safer AI systems.” 

Estelle McCool, 23, is starting a PhD in big data after leaving King’s in 2020 and taking a master’s in maths at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a first this summer. 

She is now taking a PhD at the Big Data Institute at Oxford, working with the Turing Institute and Wellcome Trust to improve global health. 

She said King’s “allowed me to truly make the most of my interest in maths, while not needing to define myself solely by that interest. In another sixth form I’d have been pigeonholed as a maths nerd, but I was able to identify with so much more.”