Week 1 Oxford

Safari photos are coming soon. I haven't had time to sort through them!!!!



Week 1 of Trinity Term

• Classes:
• Political Economics - we learned about how GDP is calculated and relevant pitfalls; we learned about informal proxies for economic development and well-being such as how "lit up" a country is from the sky and garbage as a measurement of consumption
• Entrepreneurial Finance- we dove right into creating a capitalization table based on a case we read on a carbon trading company
• 8 Key Challenges for Social Entrepreneurs- Guest speaker Tim Smets from the Eden Project blew our minds with a radical way of approaching management and fearlessly pursuing BIG ideas
• Social Finance- coming up later this week
• Infrastructure- coming up later this week. This course is going to be amazing, I think.

• Extracurriculars:
• Lean LaunchPad : On a team that will be building a business my friend is starting (in real life!) that will tackle challenges with the vocational education system in Nicaragua over the course of the month of May, alongside workshops and training sessions
• World Economic Forum consulting project: Met with members from the WEF, the business school dean, our advisor, and the team to present our progress to-date. Meeting was insightful and interesting; the hard work begins now to finish our 3rd deliverable of 4. Some of us will present the deliverables in Geneva; others will attend a convening event in fall in Dubai.

• What else I'm doing with my "spare" time
• Finding an internship/consultancy position for the summer. Looking at options in east Africa, mainly. More to come very soon!
• Attended the Clarendon Lecture Series to hear Mauro Guillén, Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies, speak on complexity and coupling as a model for understanding global systems
• Was invited to an intimate dinner with the Dean, Mauro Guillén, SBS professors, and staff from the Oxford University Press. Though the youngest in the room and the only student, I had some pretty Oxford-esque conversations with people that left the wheels turning in my head for awhile afterwards! Amazing. It is moments like this that remind me what a unique, special place Oxford truly is.