Welcome and Orientation
The first day of the CBL and Oxford high-school program went quite quickly! Throughout the day students from all courses such as PPE, Econ, Natural Science, and Law, checked in from 2 in the afternoon, and waited on some students even arriving late at 11:30 at night! A large amount of students came throughout the shuttle bus option at Heathrow Airport, where we embarked on a one and a half hour drive to Oxford. Soon after, we checked in at Somerville College, and ate dinner. (Roast beef, vegetables) The food gave me, and most people quite a shock, the level of sophistication and tastefulness.
Somerville College seemed quite impressive and yet intimidating with the famous inspirational alumni who have attended the college. The meet and greet was held at the Margaret Thatcher Centre, and from there we walked to the main courtyard. The natural elements such as the trees and flowers with the historic buildings gave quite a nice view. For about an hour we played icebreaker games, where we ran around and found people with completely different characteristics ands traits from us. You commonly get apprehensive when meeting strangers, but I felt the way CBL management organized the icebreakers was well done.
After we had met people from all kinds of subjects, we got into groups who were taking the same courses as us (in my case PPE). Our CBL manager introduced himself, and so did we. We started off the meet with a game of “two truths and a lie”, where we had to say two truths about ourselves, and pick lie to state. The other would guess which is the lie. It was very interesting to hear the odd unique details from other team members, and how diverse a group we were. That concluded the entire meet and greet and we were given the rest of the night to unpack and meet with others.