Social class and me….reflections on the role of social class in my life.

I'm a professor at the University of Cambridge, I'm a medical doctor, and I run a research group working to unpick the molecular mechanisms of lung disease. Frankly, this seems quite an odd clutch of jobs for a Nottingham boy born to a working-class family in which no one before had benefited from higher education. My father had been a truck driver until, like so many in the 1980s, he was made redundant. Poor health and old age meant he would never work again, which was a tremendous blow to someone who had never been unemployed in his life.

Like many Poles in the free Polish contingent of the British Army, he was demobbed to England in the late 1940s where he had to rebuild a life as an immigrant. My mother, an English woman, was equally hard-working, holding down several evening cleaning jobs at once while working in the kitchen of my comprehensive school by day. I remember of an evening I would accompany her when she cleaned at the local TSB Bank.

So how does a second-generation immigrant from a working-class family become a Cambridge academic? If I'm honest, through a great deal of luck. I suspect I needed more luck than had I been born wealthy, although being born wealthy is itself just another form of luck.

I enjoyed maths and sciences, and would probably have been a bookish child had I not struggled to read. In another time, I would have been called dyslexic, but that was almost unheard of back then, at least in my schools. Fortunately, I had a "remedial teacher" who took me aside for a few hours every week to work on my literacy, which was successful (but never underestimate the anxiety of a bright child who realizes their reading just isn't at the level it "should" be for their age). On the other hand, I was fortunate to find other subjects much easier and to have teachers who could work with that.

At my comprehensive school, one particular teacher (an extraordinary maths teacher called Mr Joshi) convinced half a dozen of us to take maths O-level a year early. This had not been done there before. He wasn't allowed to teach us in a separate class at an accelerated pace, so we stayed in our class of 30 with 24 friends who were taking the exam a year later. Undiscouraged, he gave us free lessons one evening a week in my friend's living room. All six of us did well thanks to that teacher who believed we could do better, and who ignored a system that expected very little of us.

The school didn't have a sixth form, in fact, a careers teacher advised me "Pupils from this school don't tend to go to university", and so from age 16, I took two buses each morning to a college on the far side of town to study for my A-levels. That state Sixth Form College had been a grammar school previously and still expected its students to aim for university. Indeed, it boasted a wooden board in the entrance foyer engraved with the names of each student who went to Oxbridge. This was a throwback to its former days and bucked the trend for egalitarianism, but it did seem to make the difficult appear possible, even normal. Not only did teachers believe that university was imaginable, they actually suggested I might want to attend lunchtime classes to prepare for Oxbridge entrance exams.

Why not? It didn't seem so strange thereafter for a council-estate boy to attend a Cambridge College open day. I didn't feel out of place for a moment. Fitzwilliam College, had a high percentage of state-educated students even before this became normal in Cambridge. I applied and was interviewed. While many private schools prepare their pupils for interviews, my Cambridge interview was a completely novel experience for which I'd had no rehearsals. It wasn't daunting but it was a unique experience in my life at that point. I got to meet clever academics who chatted with me about science, current affairs, and some photos that turned out to be electron micrographs. To my surprise, I got in and discovered that most people in Cambridge were, (and still are), kind, welcoming, and couldn't care a fig about my social background. In the first week, I struck up a conversation about gardening, (I have no idea why), with another lad in the queue to get white coats for our laboratory practicals and dissection classes. "Who's the gardener in your family?" I asked. "The gardener", he replied. We had had very different childhoods! It was awkward but very funny. Decades later, he and I remain firm friends and he was, in fact, my best man when I married a wonderful woman I met in the college next door to mine! Social background mattered for nothing to the people I respected, that is to say, to the overwhelming majority of people I met in Cambridge.

My life since then has been filled with medicine and research and happiness. I've travelled the world and worked with inspiring colleagues both in the UK and USA. I've been encouraged by mentors who were interested in my ability to think rather than my schooling (or the name of my school). These days, whenever I'm invited by a school to talk to youngsters about medicine or science or university life, I always agree. Recently, for example, it was at a state-funded Academy School in Cambridgeshire, but often it's at private schools. Perhaps staff and pupils at private schools don't see it as anything but normal to invite academics to talk to them. It isn't. It shouldn't be. Academics love to talk to anyone about the things that excite us.  So, when I am invited to talk at a private school, I still always say yes, though I strongly encourage them to invite local state school pupils too. In my experience, they always agree.

I know I have been very lucky. What would have happened if I'd listened to the person who told me "Pupils from this school don't tend to go to university"? What if I hadn't stumbled upon a state sixth form college with a grammar school history that encouraged its students to apply to Oxbridge? Achieving in life will always involve a degree of luck, but to my mind, it should never depend on the luck of having the right parents.

Stefan is a Professor of Respiratory Science at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Consultant Respiratory Physician at Addenbrooke's and Royal Papworth Hospitals. You can follow him on Twitter, @Prof_Marciniak