The Skye Foundation has been awarding scholarships to high-achieving postgraduate students based on outstanding academic achievement in any discipline for 28 years.  These awards celebrate excellence across all fields at South African universities with a proven record of quality research.  A total of about 400 scholarships have been awarded with about a third of these supporting students from UCT.  Most have studied at prestigious institutions overseas where they have continued to excel.  Many have commented that the grounding they received back home prepared them very well for their later studies.

How the Skye Foundation started

Brian and Dorothy Zylstra were both WITS graduates and long-time supporters of the university, first through a program of Rugby bursaries awarded to deserving students on an annual basis. Brian later joined the Board of Governors of the Wits Foundation and was instrumental in assisting the then Director, Professor Neville Passmore in launching what became a successful chair endowment program.  Neville, a zoologist and active field researcher, was newly recruited into this fundraising role by the then Vice-Chancellor, Professor R W Charlton and he and Brian worked together on a variety of fundraising projects, several of which Brian supported in his personal capacity.  He was awarded the University Council Gold Medal for his service to the university and humanity.  When Brian later sold his company, he expressed a desire to extend his support of deserving students and enlisted Neville’s assistance in designing a program that could best achieve this. The Skye Foundation was established in 1997. Its brief was simple – to provide Masters and PhD scholarships awarded solely on the basis of consistently outstanding academic performance in any discipline - tenable at any university in the world.

The number of annual awards has increased steadily through further capital injection, prudent financial management and co-funding agreements with both Cambridge, Oxford and co-funding assistance from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.  For the last 28 years, Neville has been managing the student intake and progress, ably assisted by an Awards Committee comprising other Trustees and including several senior academics, notably Professors R M Crewe and E J Carruthers.

Selecting the cream of the crop

In determining how to find the best candidates for the awards, the trustees settled on the excellent strategy of making it a requirement that Deans nominate potential candidates whose academic referees offered unreserved support.  The awards were made to candidates of exceptional merit who distinguished themselves academically in their first or subsequent degrees and were under the age of 30. The approach of requiring nomination by Deans was embraced by the universities and proved to be of great benefit. About 15 years ago, Cambridge University asked how they could attract more candidates of this calibre and the Skye Foundation set up joint scholarships with Cambridge and Oxford universities.

Funding has given the recipients wings to soar in their fields

“The recipients of the scholarship are an extraordinary group of people who have succeeded at such a range of things from mathematics, science, music, engineering to drama”, commented Neville. They have thrived and gone on to achieve distinctions, accolades and fulfil important roles in business, government, healthcare and academia in South Africa and throughout the world. For many students, the experience of studying abroad was life-changing. One of the recipients had received a distinction for an MPhil at Cambridge in Biochemistry and when, after a hiatus, they contacted Neville, it was to say that they had completed a PhD and working as a senior scientist had made important advances in the understanding of Parkinson’s disease. A violinist from the programme got to play first violin in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.  Yet another student is a saxophonist at the Hague Conservatory, where her supervisor says she will be one of the next generation of world saxophonists.  Yet another student who studied mime in Paris is now teaching deaf students with great success in South Africa. Neville recounts how a report on one of the students in the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge (where 30 Nobel prize winners came from) stated that the student was not only top of their Master’s class, but their work was better than most of the PhD students and postdoctoral students and better than some members of staff!  Such is the quality of academic grounding produced by South African universities…

The Skye Foundation comes to an end

This is the last year of funding students and Neville will now retire at the age of 78.  “This has not been a job – it has been a mission. I have enjoyed engaging with these exceptional students, being a sounding board for them, solving problems and offering support and suggestions.  It has been rewarding to see the students go on to be so successful in their fields,” said Neville. 
The end of the Skye Foundation Trust will leave a gaping hole in postgraduate funding for overseas study for South African students.  It is hoped that there will be others who can take up the reins of an amazing project like this that takes exceptional South African students across all disciplines and gives them opportunities to study abroad and achieve their full potential.