So many people, and so many events…It’s an Oxford thing

Earlier this year, I saw tweets, Instagram photos and Facebook posts with the hashtag #ItsAnOxfordThing. At the time, I did not really understand what this meant. But now, as my year at Oxford’s Said Business School is at full throttle, I get it.

So what is an “Oxford thing”? It could probably be best described as those moments when you realise what great opportunities are presented by attending Said business school – which is part of a historic and diverse university.

Here is an example. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently came to Oxford, and while he gave more than his fair share of talks, he also made time to have dinner at Balliol College with a bunch of us from the Oxford Seed Fund. This is where I got to talk with him, one on one – unfettered access to Biz Stone, that is an Oxford thing.

And so these opportunities continue to present themselves. I was privileged to recently bring Ian Urbina, a journalist from of the New York Times, to Oxford for a talk on lawlessness on the high seas, his area of expertise. Fifteen of my fellow classmates and I sat in on a seminar with him, and then had the opportunity to ask questions about his work. A group of us then ended up having lunch with him, where we started throwing out ideas on how to fund long-form journalism in the future.

As I write this, I am enjoying another “Oxford thing”, sitting in on a guest lecture given by Kelly Bennett, chief marketing officer of Netflix, who is responsible for a $1bn a year marketing budget. He is talking about the evolution of Netflix and where the company is going. I am particularly interested in this, as I made a film that Netflix acquired, which will be coming out this autumn. Shockingly, Mr Bennett has already seen it, but more on this in a future post.

Oxford is by no means a perfect institution: it is decentralised, with bastions of power in its colleges, in larger institutions such as Saïd Business School, and in smaller institutions such as the Skoll Centre. Sometimes messages get miscommunicated between these places. Turf wars have happened, are happening and will continue.

But the university is not one that exists within silos. I run into friends on the street here every day. And sometimes, I divert where I am going and embark on new conversations, or go to different places. My day is regularly influenced by these seemingly random encounters and the close proximity to so many people and events. This has opened my mind in ways I would never have expected. This, for sure, is an Oxford thing.