Essay Prizes
Thank you for your interest in Peterhouse's Vellacott History Prize, Kelvin Science Prize and Thomas Campion English Prize. The competition opens for Year 12 students in February.
This year's questions are now published for the Campion and Kelvin Prizes. Please note that the Vellacott Prize has changed and has no questions set for it. Please read through the attached information carefully. All essays should be no more than 2,000 words, incl. footnotes and appendices, and should be submitted as PDFs. The deadline is 16:00 GMT Monday 20th April 2020 and the deadline for teacher approval is 16:00 GMT Monday 27th April 2020. If you are entering the Vellacott Prize, you must send the intended title of your essay to essayprize@pet.cam.ac.uk by 16:00 GMT Monday 16th March 2020.
Last year we received over 600 entries from students from over 300 different schools. The standard was incredibly high and the judges found it really difficult to select the winners, but we were excited to invite 35 winners to Peterhouses and commended a further 15 students. Congratulations to all the entrants; the time you spent researching your topics and writing your essays has been invaluable preparation for university study. We look forward to hearing from any of you who are interested in applying to Peterhouse.
The Peterhouse Essay Competitions are a great opportunity for Year 12 students to start exploring their subject and get a taste of university-level research. Each competition has a prize pool of £750. Instructions for the prize are available on the left hand side of this page as attachments. Please see below for further details.
UPDATE: Results have now been sent out to all entrants. We are unable tp provide individual feedback, due to the volume of entries. If you have any other queries, please email essayprize@pet.cam.ac.uk
Instructions for entrants and essay questions are provided for the Kelvin, Thomas Campion and Vellacott prizes on the lefthand side as attachments. There is also an FAQ page for entrants and their teachers, as well as a guide for teachers on how to use our online system to run an internal competition within school and how to approve or modify essays.
If you have any further questions, after reading through the FAQs and the guides to submitting, please get in touch with Catherine Walker, our Schools Liaison Officer, at essayprize@pet.cam.ac.uk.