Downing's new Head of Academic Skills 

The College has recently appointed Dr Hamish Symington as Fellow and Head of Academic Skills, supporting students in getting the most out of their time at Cambridge. We caught up with him to find out more about him and what he’ll be doing to help Downing students.

Why is Downing investing in teaching academic skills?

Studying at university is very different to studying at school: the timetable is much more freeform, and students need to take responsibility for their own learning in a way which most of them haven’t experienced before. Directors of Studies and supervisors give some guidance on learning how to learn in this new context, but there’s a limit to the amount of help that these already very busy people can provide.

If we can give students targeted, effective guidance on how to engage with and learn from lectures, supervisions and university work, we can help them develop their skills of analysis, critical thinking, argument and communication. This role provides someone in College with the space to consider our approach to teaching students how to learn from their studies, and to offer targeted one-to-one help for students who need it. It's also about trajectory: helping students see where the skills they are honing might take them next and how to leverage their time at Downing to best effect.

Shouldn’t students just learn this as they go?

That’s one argument. But I was talking about the role with several people at the most recent Alumni Festival, and everyone – literally everyone – commented that there’d not been any help with things like this when they were an undergrad, and that they would have found it really useful. Looking at it another way: we don’t expect students to learn content by trial and error, so why should we expect them to use trial and error when learning how best to engage with their studies? It’s not pandering to students; it’s helping them get more out of their education.

How are you hoping to develop the academic community at Downing?

I’m delighted to see so many thriving academic societies here in College, hearing from amazing and inspiring speakers, and bringing people together across years and subjects. I’m going to be celebrating the work they do, helping them publicise their events to get more undergraduates, postgraduates and Fellows attending, and helping them take as many opportunities as possible to bring people together for intellectual stimulation, debate and enjoyment. The MCR put on a brilliant series of seminars where postgraduate students showcase their research, plus a full-day conference in the Easter term, and I’ll be working with them to involve undergraduates in these sessions, so those who are interested in taking their studies further can get a flavour of what postgraduate life is like. Essentially, my approach is to be as interested as possible in everything that everyone is doing, with the aim of bringing people together.

What about targeted support?

I’ll be running seminars for particular subjects or year groups to look in more detail at key aspects of their work. But because this job is full-time, I’ll also have the capacity to work with students one-to-one on areas where they feel less secure – time management, essay writing, revision and more. I’ve been doing these one-to-ones for a good while now, and I’ve seen many students react really well to a few nudges in the right direction. In these sessions, I aim to coach students, helping them explore their own feelings about their work and come up with their own answers to questions.

How did you come to work in this area?

This is a tricky question to answer! I’ve not had a straightforward career path: I came to Cambridge in 1999 to study physics, graduated with a degree in biochemistry, then trained as a graphic designer. Alongside that, I wrote software, eventually running a small company, but then left that to do a PhD in Plant Sciences, then a research fellowship at Queens’ College here in Cambridge. All the way along, I’ve been fortunate to be able to make a living from things which interest me.

I originally came back to research because I wanted to make the world a slightly better place for my daughter. However, over the course of my PhD and research fellowship, I came to understand that research is very, very slow, and that it would take me a very long time to make any kind of impact. During this time, I also fell in love with teaching, and realised that I could make a much bigger impact by helping undergraduates be excited by their subject, and by teaching them how to think and be curious. My previous life as a communicator (albeit in the world of design and software) has helped me develop engaging teaching materials and deliver high-quality supervisions, seminars and one-to-ones, and it’s in this latter area where I’ve found I can have a really big impact. So, the next turn in my career is along these lines. I’m so proud to see how my students develop through their time here, and I hope that I’m able to play a small part in setting them up to be the best they can be, whatever they do once they leave Downing.

What about life outside Downing?

I’m very much of the belief that to be effective at work you need time to switch off as well (which is why I tell students that their timetable should include at least one full day off per week, with no academic work). When I’m not here you’ll find me on my allotment, either with the plants or with my beehives, and I brew mead from my honey, too. I occasionally sing bass for assorted choirs in Cambridge and set cryptic crosswords for the Guardian and other outlets under the pseudonym ‘Soup’. And I love spending time with my daughter, who is a whirlwind of energy; all my wife and I can really do is trail along in her wake.

Published 17 October 2025