Whilst growing up in a low-income family in Azerbaijan, Aygun Badalova taught herself fluent English to fulfil her life-long dream of studying in England. This year she graduated with an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology. Read her story 👉
We can confirm that we are to withdraw from UK university rankings as we believe they do not give an accurate picture of the strengths of the College, but Birkbeck will remain part of the international listings.
Birkbeck's Prof Matthew Davies leads new online map project that lets users peel back London’s streets to trace its changes over the past 500 years. 'Layers of London' reveal lost fields, open rivers & debtor prisons in what are now dense urban streets.
At Birkbeck, we’re proud to offer our students the chance to change their lives through education and make admissions decisions based on students’ future potential, not just their past attainment.
As the only university in London to have secured University of Sanctuary status, Birkbeck is working with a range of partner organisations to do all we can to support Afghan scholars and students trying to continue their education and work. 1/3
Last week over 200 members of the Birkbeck community gathered at Mansion House to commemorate Birkbeck's 200th anniversary, with speeches from Birkbeck’s Vice-Chancellor and HRH The Princess Royal:
#Birkbeck200
Happy Birthday to Birkbeck's founder, George Birkbeck, who would have been 245 today! Almost 200 years since our founding, we still adhere to the same values that inspired our creation; education is for everyone. ✨
We're delighted to award author
@KitdeWaal
with a Fellowship today, in recognition of the support she has given to MA Creative Writing students through the Kit de Waal Scholarship programme 🎓
#BBKGrad
We're so proud to announce that Professor Sir Roger Penrose OM has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work carried out at Birkbeck in the 1960s, which demonstrated that black holes were an inevitable consequence of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 😮
Yesterday, we welcomed the Rt Hon John Bercow to
@bbksshp
graduation, as he was conferred a fellowship at the College.
Here is some of John's advice to students 🎤 What's your fav line from John's wisdom?
#johnbercow
@HoC_Speaker_MP
When Birkbeck was founded, artisans and craftspeople could learn about science, art, and economics for the first time: a concept so controversial that George Birkbeck was accused of 'scattering the seeds of evil'.
Today we celebrate Virginia Woolf's birthday ✨ Woolf was a prominent British author who lived in Bloomsbury for much of her life. In fact, our
@birkbeck_arts
building in Gordon Square was once Woolf's home and a meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group. 📚💜
We're so proud to be the first higher education institution in London to be awarded University of Sanctuary status for our support of refugees and asylum seekers! 💜 Well done BBK 👏
We're celebrating the 100th anniversary of Birkbeck alumna, Rosalind Franklin's, birth this weekend 🎉 It was her work on X-ray diffraction studies that eventually made possible the double helix theory of DNA! 🧬 Check out this video series to celebrate:
Tonight! 🤩 We'll be back on your screens competing in
#UniversityChallenge
on
@BBCTwo
at 8:30pm. Tune in to see if we manage to secure a place in the quarter-finals! Good luck Birkbeck! 👏
#TeamBirkbeck
It's officially the first day of term & we would like to welcome all new and returning students to Birkbeck! It's going to be different this year, but we hope that you'll enjoy your studies and have a great experience with your fellow students, albeit virtually 💜
#hellobbk
We're proud to announce Birkbeck is ranked first in London by part-time students for teaching and overall satisfaction, according to the National Student Survey published on Thursday! 🎉 Read more 👉
@nss_ipsos
After a year long application process and an hour long excruciating interview I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been finally
#ChosenForChevening
!
I’ll be doing my masters in geography at
@BirkbeckUoL
this October -
Did you know that Birkbeck was founded with the aim of educating the working people of London? We've been helping people access higher education and transform their lives since our creation in 1823. 🤩 1/4
The Birkbeck community has been deeply affected by the recent events in the USA and we also acknowledge that racism is a lived reality for many Black, Asian and ethnic minority people in the UK and across the globe.
At Birkbeck, we have a relatively high number of BAME students compared with other universities, but at
#PhD
level, the representation of BAME students is lower. That's why we're offering 5 fully funded
#studentships
for
#BAME
PhD students. 🤩👏
Tune in to
@cbbc
’s ‘Operation Ouch!’, a show that educates young viewers about the world of medicine & biology, tonight at 5pm to see our
@BirkbeckBabylab
team chatting to
@xandvt
about the brain activity of babies when they sleep! 👶🍼
#OperationOuch
We are pleased to announce that Professor Sally Wheeler, OBE has been appointed as Birkbeck's new Vice-Chancellor and will take up her new post on 1st January 2024. Read more:
Our BAME students form a relatively high percentage of overall student numbers, but the proportion of
#BAME
students at PhD level is significantly lower. In order to address this, we're offering our Diversity100 PhD studentships for 2021 entry & are now inviting applications! 1/2
This
#InternationalWomensDay
, we're celebrating the fact that in 1830, Birkbeck took the radical step of becoming one of the first colleges to admit women as students - nearly 40 years before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
On this day in 1823 the London Mechanics’ Institute, which later went on to become Birkbeck University, was founded.
Happy 200th Anniversary Birkbeck.
Changing lives since 2 December 1823.
Read more:
#Birkbeck200
👀 Did you know that the new UK Government has more Birkbeckians than Etonians? 🎓
Find out more in this blog that reflects on the reach and impact of Birkbeck alumni 👇
We think former Birkbeck scientist Rosalind Franklin would be more appropriate on the new £50 note. She played a crucial role in decoding the structure of DNA.
What do you think? 💷💷
We're so proud to be placed fourth in the ranking of UK universities for our impact on advancing the social mobility of our graduating students. 🎉
#highereducation
#socialmobility
The best thing about our students is that they come from all ages, nationalities, backgrounds & walks of life 💜 Today, we want to celebrate that by hearing what made you choose to study at Birkbeck 💬👇
#proudtobeBBK
We are delighted to announce the opening of Birkbeck's Centre for Neurodiversity at Work, the UK's first centre to research neurodiversity in the workplace. Cutting-edge research will enhance & support ethical, impactful organisational practice. Read more:
Meet Patricia, the 91-year-old MA Shakespeare & Contemporary Performance graduate who watched 37 performances at
@The_Globe
for her dissertation (once watching three in one day!) 🤩
#inspired
I get tired of “under 40” lists. Show me someone who got their PhD at 60 after losing everything. Give me the 70-year-old debut novelist who writes from a lifetime of love and grief. Give me calloused hands and tender hearts.
14 Birkbeck Alumni and Fellows, including 3 Cabinet Members, elected to Parliament 👏- a reflection of Birkbeck's history as a university of choice for Parliamentarians and policymakers.
#UKGeneralElection2024
👉
We're so proud to announce that Birkbeck has been reconfirmed as one of the UK's leading research-intensive universities, with 83% of research confirmed as world-leading and internationally excellent in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework 🎉 Read more:
Established on values to educate the working class in 1823, we are proud to say that our founding principles are still at the core of what we do. With 64% of our part-time students from low-income backgrounds, we strive to give opportunities to those who need them most.
YES TEAM! 👏 Huge congratulations to our
#UniversityChallenge
team for an impressive win last night! Excited to watch you in the next round! Go Team Birkbeck 🥳 You can catch up on last night's episode here:
@BirkbeckUnion
We're proud to be merging with
@openlibhums
, a journal publisher where articles are freely and permanently accessible for everyone, immediately after publication. This supports our ethos that education should be made available to all 💜
BOOM! Team Birkbeck are through to the quarter-finals after a great round against
@OpenUniversity
last night on
#UniversityChallenge
🥳😆👏 Thank you for a good game OU!
Tonight! 🤩 We'll be back on your screens competing in
#UniversityChallenge
on
@BBCTwo
at 8:30pm. Tune in to see if we manage to secure a place in the quarter-finals! Good luck Birkbeck! 👏
#TeamBirkbeck
Today is World Access to Higher Education Day! 🎉 Birkbeck was founded on the idea that education should be open to everyone. That's why we run our classes in the evening - so that whatever commitments you might already have, education is still an option for you! 🦉
Following a vote by nearly 2000 students, staff and alumni, we've chosen a new logo that will sit alongside our existing logo to mark two centuries of evening study. 🦉😲
Did you know that Birkbeck was one of the first colleges to admit women as students? Women started attending Birkbeck in 1830, nearly 40 years before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge!
Find out more about Birkbeck's rich history:
HUGE congratulations to our fantastic team on another
#universitychallenge
win last night, this time against
@sheffielduni
!
Well played Sheffield, you were a great competitor 👏
And of course, always a pleasure to hear BIRKBECK MCMILLAN 🐓🤣
To all of our students + members of our community that are key workers, we wanted to say thank you 💜 - for keeping us safe + allowing the country to keep running in these unprecedented times. Huge respect for you and everything you are doing ✨ Tag someone to say thank you 🙋♀️
Read the incredible story of one Birkbeck student who escaped Syria, secured a scholarship as an asylum seeker and is now thriving studying a Politics degree at Birkbeck. Well done Ishmael 👏👏👏
#helloBBK
For 197 years my college
#Birkbeck
has basically said: you know what, forget what your
#AlevelResults
are, let’s just have a conversation about your aims and ambitions instead. Take a look, give us a call.
🌳 Tree Appreciation Post 🌳 Today is
#LoveATreeDay
, and so we thought we'd reflect on some of the oaks that we miss admiring on campus. Tag us in your throwback pics from around Bloomsbury to celebrate the beautiful place we love to study from! We'll be back soon Bloomsbury!🌳💚
Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures recently hosted the launch of Anwar Akhtar’s new film: Pakistan’s Best Kept Secret – Lahore Museum.
The film has been developed by The Samosa Media Project, which is supported by
@Birkbeck_Arts
.
It's the first day of the new academic year! Good luck to all new and returning students joining us this week, we hope you have a brilliant autumn term! 🎉🦉
#helloBBK
Huge congratulations to Prof.
@martin_eve
of
@birkbeck_arts
for being awarded the prestigious
@LeverhulmeTrust
Prize for Languages and Literature. Professor Eve's research centres on contemporary American fiction & histories and philosophies of technologies!
Well done 👏
HRH The Princess Royal visited today to mark our 100th anniversary with
@UoLondon
! She was given a tour of our world-leading research into the early signs of autism, and met students from our award-winning Compass Project, which supports refugees + asylum seekers to access HE.
"What the treatment of Meghan Markle exemplifies is that there are limitations to Black British citizenship." Following the launch of Markle's new podcast, revisit Dr
@willackah
's blog from the archives - Racism, Royalty & the Limitations of Britishness:
We’re celebrating the birthday of George Birkbeck today, whose speech on educating working Londoners in 1823 laid the foundation for Birkbeck. His principles to educate working people remain firmly in our mission as we commemorate our 200th year.
#Birkbeck200
#Birkbeckbicentenary
This year we welcomed 20 new scholars as part of the
#CompassProject
, a scheme that helps refugees and asylum seekers access higher education in the UK. Read about how they were introduced this year to Birkbeck and to London 👉
@BBKOutreach
Two PhD students from Syria have joined Birkbeck on Fellowships from the Council for At-Risk Academics.
@CARA1933
has been providing support to academics fleeing from oppressive regimes since 1933 & Birkbeck has a long history of supporting refugees too.
We'd love to see former Birkbeck scientist Rosalind Franklin on the new £50 note. She played a crucial role in decoding the structure of DNA.
Who would you like to see? 💷💷💷
This year, Birkbeck will be welcoming 28
@cheveningfco
Scholars! 🥳
Students will be attending from 23 countries and studying a range of subjects, including screenwriting, business innovation and global politics.
Congratulations, we can't wait!
After being raised in care in East London and getting in trouble with the police during his childhood, Mark left school with no GCSEs or A-Levels before embarking on a successful 20-year career as a dance DJ and music producer, which included presenting a show on
@BBCRadio1Xtra
.
We're proud to announce our new partnership with
@GoldmanSachs
to create the Goldman Sachs & Birkbeck Diversity Fund - a suite of scholarships, bursaries & hardship funds for students from Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic backgrounds, assisting those affected by COVID-19.
Wow! 😮 One of our PhD students,
@keithjlondon
, has his poem projected across St. Paul's Cathedral this week.
The poem tells the story of St Paul's Watch: volunteers who risked their lives to protect St. Paul's during the Blitz.
@PoetrySociety
@HistoricEngland
#WhereLightFalls
We wanted to say a huge congratulations to Prof Jonathan Smith for his election as Honorary Fellow of the
@BPSOfficial
- one of the highest awards of the
#BPS
, with the list of previous recipients including Carl Jung & Noam Chomsky 😲
Birkbeck's Prof Matthew Davies leads new online map project that lets users peel back London’s streets to trace its changes over the past 500 years. 'Layers of London' reveal lost fields, open rivers & debtor prisons in what are now dense urban streets.
9 year old tells his mum “You’re going to be amazing” as she graduates with a first class degree in Law from Birkbeck. Read Chloe's amazing story here 👉
#BBKgrad
#OnThisDay
Rosalind Franklin, a British scientist who made important contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA & RNA, was born!🥳She worked as a Research Fellow at BBK when she made her discoveries about the structure of RNA. 🤩
Congratulations to our Professor Anthony Bale, who has been elected as President of
@NCS_Chaucer
which provides a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey
#Chaucer
and his age.
#MedievalTwitter
🎉
We're so excited to say that our new building at 373 Euston Road has been announced as the winner of the New London Architecture Awards 'learning' category 2021, for its striking design and BREEAM 'Excellent' sustainability rating! ✨ Read more:
Applications are open for our Diversity100 PhD Studentships 🎉 - covering all tuition fees + a tax-free stipend for living expenses! Only open to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students. Find out more 👉
#BAME
#studentship
Birkbeck is calling for Dr Rosalind Franklin, who worked in the Department of
#Crystallography
here, to be the face of the new £50 note. 💷💷💷
#50poundnote
'After having suffered so much trauma in my life, I was desperate to find something rewarding and positive.' Usha Rasagopal graduated this week - a huge feat after her traumatic upbringing escaping the civil war in Sri Lanka. Read her
#bbkgrad
story:
We were extremely upset to learn that Eric Salama has been attacked and injured in an incident in Kew. Eric has been a passionate supporter and governor of the College for a number of years and we would like to wish him a speedy recovery. Our thoughts are with him and his family.
What does it mean to be educated? Why have Birkbeck's students been prepared to give up so much to study for a higher degree? Prof
@bourke_joanna
will be discussing her new book, ‘Birkbeck – 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People’ this Thursday:
Our response to the Government's latest announcement around
#ALevelsResults
- A THREAD 1/5 ✨:
Birkbeck has a long history of providing opportunity for everyone. We welcome the Government’s announcement that A-level grades will now be determined by teacher assessments.
Eric Hobsbawm was the best-known & most widely respected historian in the world. Check out this
#BBKInspires
, tonight, about Eric’s life and legacy - with Professor Julian Swann and Professor Sir Richard J Evans. ✨
#twitterstorians
Wow! What a brilliant, tense episode of
#UniversityChallenge
last night - another win for Team Birkbeck! 🦉 Well done to our fantastic team! 👏
Watch the episode:
@BirkbeckUnion
We loved attending the unveiling of the new Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan blue
@EnglishHeritage
plaque! 🎉 Dame Helen helped to form + lead the first women's army corps, as well as being Head of the Botany Department at Birkbeck. She even has fungal species named in her honour! 🍄