Forward Together recollections by Professor Rebecca Kilner

When Professor Rebecca Kilner was appointed as a University lecturer in the Department of Zoology in 2005, she was part of a small but visible group of women on the academic faculty. When her two female colleagues in Zoology retired, Rebecca was the only one left, for five years. That isolation wasn’t easy, and Sidney kept her going through it.

Rebecca came to Sidney Sussex College at a time when it offered something she hadn’t found elsewhere: other women, shared purpose, and a kind of leadership she hadn’t seen before. Watching Sandra Dawson, Sidney’s first female Master, changed how she saw what leadership could do and what it could feel like.

“It was the first time I properly understood what good leadership looks like, and how vital it is for building communities and enacting a plan.”

Until then, Rebecca hadn’t imagined herself in leadership. Sandra showed her why it mattered. And what it looked like when done well.

Sidney shaped more than Rebecca’s professional life. She got married in the College’s Chapel. By sheer coincidence, the Google Maps aeroplane was flying overhead that weekend, capturing, in one blurry frame, the marquee in Court, the garden afterparty, and a moment in time that now lives on screen. “Very blurred and very out of focus,” she says, “very much in keeping with the state of the people there.”

Now, as we mark 50 years of co-education at Sidney, Rebecca reflects not with sentimentality but with certainty. The decision to admit women wasn’t just progressive. It was profoundly right. And like many, she can trace much of what followed back to that moment.

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