Students have enjoyed a raft of new experiences over the past couple of days, visiting Oxford’s famous museums, listening to motivational speakers in the Wesley Memorial Church, seeing the latest Marvel offering in the cinema, and creating inventive sculptures in a new and interesting medium.
On Sunday, students had the pleasure of wandering the galleries of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and peering into its cabinets and display cases: they came face to face with shrunken heads and learned about how different peoples and cultures have approached the business of human life. On show were tools, textiles, weapons, jewellery, and musical instruments from almost every continent: Antarctica will remain unrepresented in the Pitt Rivers just as long as it remains un-populated and therefore lacking in human culture.
At the ORACLE event on Sunday, students listened as two inspirational characters, Ivan Beckley and Andrew Bernard. Ivan, a student at University College London, is founder and director of Limitless Generation CIC, a social enterprise that delivers personal development talks and workshops to students from non-selective schools in London. Andrew, or “Bernie” to anyone who knows him, has run Innovative Enterprise since 2005, delivering workshops to encourage students in the UK, continental Europe and the UAE to put their minds to creative and original ventures. Students left the Church thoroughly fired up, and ready to take on the issues that irk them most.
On Monday evening after a day of technical considerations in Introduction to Architecture, and ethical debates in Law, followed by an active afternoon on the tennis courts and football field, students had the choice of enjoying the exploits of the teenage Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming, or engaging in a new creative activity in chicken-wire sculpture. The activities enjoyed a pretty even split, and at the end of the evening, cinema-goers thrilled the artistes with tales of plot twists and special effects upon their return, whilst those who stayed in showed off their stylish designs.