July 4th! (or just any day in the U.K)
The third day in the Oxford Program was very packed and hat less orientation to the program itself. We started off the day like any other: wake up, eat breakfast, and meet up at the lawn. From there we met up with a tour guide of the university and walked around many historical sites and buildings. Oxford is such a unique place because every step you take, you are walking on monumental events in history.
The tour was very informative on how Oxford was established, and how it was originally a sort of religious area for all forms of Christianity. We looked at many historical architectural sites, which were grand and magnificent. My favourite part of the tour was looking at the building where C.S Lewis studied, because so many of the surroundings actually connected with many important features in the book. The tour was very useful for me especially, because of all the pictures I was required to take for my photography scholarship.
The tour lasted a very long time! Nearly four hours of walking and learning about Oxford. We arrived back at Somerville at 12:30 noon. From there, my friends and I checked out and walked towards a large bookshop we passed before. It had three floors and café! They had an entire floor for subjects dedicated to studies I was interested in such as; Philosophy, Psycology, Politics, and Economics. It was so hard choosing a book to buy, I decided not to get any 🙁
Once we arrived, we quickly made our way to Margaret Thatcher Centre and had our first Global Perspectives Workshop. In this we talked about the Carbon Footprint, and listed efforts our home countries were making to reduce it. Once we finished brainstorming we got into groups with similar regions of where we were from (I’m from everywhere so I just stuck to North America because of my Canadian Citizenship). We started thinking of new ideas and inventions that could realistically improve our footprint and the world. This was quite frustrating because all of us had many different ideas, so we created an umbrella idea that was sort of a compromise: The Independent Household Eco-Friendly Act.
After this we had Negotiations. We learned how to debate in the British Parliamentary system, which I’m not too fond of due to the team system. During a mock debate, I was the last minute. Finally, we had a quick team building activity with sports and athletics involved, and then our schedule ended for the day.