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£6,000 for deaf student

Deaf student Helen Willis has been awarded the £6000 UK Graeme Clarke Scholarship to help her in her studies at Oxford.

Willis lost her hearing when she was only 18 months old due to meningitis. She said, “My parents were told I would never be able to speak and I would need special support for the rest of my life.”

Thanks to a cochlear implant Willis was able to achieve straight As at Mary Hare Grammar School for the deaf in Newbury and apply successfully to St John’s College, where she is a second year student of physiology and psychology. Willis is also currently the Disability Rep at St John’s. She has just started filming a documentary for St John’s TV station that aims to provide a first-person account of what it is like to have a cochlear implant.

She told Cherwell, “Previous television documentaries on deafness and cochlear implants have generally been third-person accounts, and I feel that the best way to understand how the cochlear implant works and the challenges the recipients face is to directly experience it for yourself.”

The scholarship Willis received was set up to honour the memory of Professor Graeme Clarke, the pioneer of the modern cochlear implant, and is presented to deaf students on both the basis of academic achievement and commitment to the foundation’s ideals of humanity and leadership.

The grant will allow Willis to pursue her education beyond undergraduate level. She commented, “As a result of the fact that I no longer have to pay for my undergraduate study it means that I can now afford to enrol in a DPhil programme, which is something I’d very much like to do.”

Willis continued, “I hope to use my personal experience with the cochlear implant to inform understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in this process. “

She emphasised the importance of the implant to her, telling Cherwell, “It has totally transformed my life. Meningitis had left me no residual hearing whatsoever, and as a result, no voice.

“Thanks to the implant giving me back some sense of hearing, I can now better appreciate environmental sound, understand what others are saying and learn how to speak.”

Life at Oxford still presents challenges for Willis as the implant still does not give her perfect hearing. However, she said, “I would not be a student at Oxford and be living my dream without the cochlear implant.”

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