Gareth Leyshon (Revd Dr)

Keble College 1991, Physics

No-one in my family had previously attended any University, let alone Oxbridge, but my parents and my teachers encouraged me to aim high. At my comprehensive school, I was able to take 4 A-levels (physics, double maths and chemistry) and duly started the Oxford application process.

I well remember my interviews – it snowed, but the roads from Wales to Oxford were passable! At interview, the Keble dons asked me to solve a problem concerning water pressure on deep sea divers. My initial protests that A-level hadn’t yet covered fluid dynamics were dismissed by gentle encouragement to think about the problem, and to my own surprise, I found that with a little prompting I could step into the unknown and apply physics.

After Oxford, I pursued a PhD in astrophysics at the University of Wales, Cardiff, but then made a radical career change by retraining as a full-time Roman Catholic priest. Oxford was the kind of place where students work hard and play hard, and there was a thriving network of Catholic student societies backed by a team of Chaplains. Through the Chaplaincy and student community, as well as Keble’s Anglican chapel, I received a much broader experience of church than I would ever have encountered in Wales, and that formed a solid base for my future ministry.

The world-wide-web was in its infancy in the early 1990s, but the Oxford Physics degree exposed me to a wide range of computer technology which left me with enough skills to run administrative web-pages during my PhD years at Cardiff, and to maintain the back-end of our webserver in my current role as a Chaplain at the University of Glamorgan. Astrophysical know-how also enabled me to develop software to calculate the date of Easter based on lunar cycles and to identify the direction of Mecca for a signpost in the Chaplaincy’s room for worship!

I look back on my years at Keble with great affection, and it strikes me that whoever said that “school days are the happiest days of your life” must have missed out on the undergraduate experience at Oxford!