When I was a lad, and the Internet was all fields, the idea of going to university seemed far-fetched. I grew up in a small, working-class town in the north-east of England, where very few people went on to higher education. Until I was 17 and started applying for university places, the term BSc meant ‘bronze swimming certificate’. All I knew about university was that you could expect to take part in an annual boat race, and get a grilling from Bamber Gascoigne.

I guess that the situation is different in larger towns and cities. If your formative years are spent somewhere that has a university, you must get at least a sense of what these institutions are about from an early age. But there are still many young people from areas or families with no tradition of going to university. It’s hard to pursue opportunities if you’re not really aware that they exist.

So I liked this idea to give more 11-18 year-olds a taster of academic life.

Imperial College are driving a scheme to get 3500 young people onto 30 different courses over the summer break. The activities ‘range from building robots to using computers to make artworks and learning about how Google’s search engine works’. This includes careers advice and an introduction to research in Imperial’s Department of Computing.

Older pupils can see what it’s like to be a medical student, thanks to week-long courses at Imperial’s Faculty of Medicine, and shadowing doctors at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. And looking beyond undergraduate life, there’s even a hands-on entrepreneurial bioscience course.

It’s not a unique idea, and Imperial have run these courses in previous years, but it deserves some praise. I suspect many of the participants will be the bright young things who would have gone on to study science at university anyway, but I hope the scheme seeds a few minds that might never have considered this option.