Elly Walters
Highly Commended, Inclusive Practice
Elly is the most impressive student I have met in my 25 years at Cambridge, at College AND Faculty level, in terms of her activities towards inclusiveness. Since day one at Cambridge, Elly has been involved in our Magdalene Feminist society, fighting for a better representation of female and queer students in College, as well as implementing and consolidating better parity with male students at Magdalene.
Elly started working in 2018 for refugee centres in Paris, at the CEDRE refugee centre, helping hundreds of asylum seekers in a very deprived part of Paris, using her languages to help translate documents and provide information to migrants aged 15 - 75... often living on the strets without food or shelter, under the threat of deportation. Elly volunteered [at CEDRE] for nearly a whole year, during her academic studies at ENS Paris, finding time to go to this peripheral and sometimes dangerous part of Paris, at a time when a small group of volunteers... had to face up to 250 migrants per day, all desperate to get information, have documents read or translated, etc. I was told that Elly was simply outstanding.
Elly Walters is a fourth-year Undergraduate (2019-20) reading Modern and Medieval Languages at Magdalene College.