Oxford minds, global questions
Five afternoon labs run alongside the tutorials, each half taught and half performed: students learn a method, then put their own work in front of the room. The learning sticks because it has to survive an audience.
AI & Human Intelligence
Learning to work ahead of the machine.
Language models are treated as instruments with known strengths and known failure modes. Students test them against work of their own, and learn what has to be checked before any of it can be used in an argument.
Recall, speed
First drafts, translation.
Summary, analogy
Structure.
Setting the question
Judging the evidence, defending the conclusion.
What does intellectual independence mean when every answer is available in four seconds?
Critical Thinking
More information than ever, and less time to judge any of it.
Signal and noise, first principles, argument mapping, bias and base rates, source triangulation, deepfakes. Fluency is not evidence: a claim survives three independent routes of checking, or it stays unconfirmed.
The most unexpected thing I learned here was how to think.
Design Thinking
Understand the problem before you trust a solution.
Design thinking is the human-centred method used in the world’s best studios and engineering schools: understand the person with the problem, define it precisely, generate options, and test the cheapest version early. Students learn it on a real brief, then turn it on themselves, designing and testing plans for their own next five years.
Junaid Aziz
Lecturer, Stanford University. Fellow, Stanford Life Design Lab. Junaid teaches life design at Stanford, where the method was developed.
Five moves
Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. Find out you were wrong early, while it is still cheap to be wrong.
Stanford is my dream college, and I got to learn design thinking from somebody who teaches it there. We loved every minute.
Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Building a case for a venture, and testing whether it holds.
Problem first, jobs to be done, user discovery, value proposition, market sizing, and the smallest version that can actually be tested. The work is judged as an academic exercise, not a business game.
A team that says it does not yet know beats a team that invents a number.
Debate & Persuasion
Learning to hold a position in front of a room.
Having an argument and being able to make one are different abilities. The lab teaches the second, in the British Parliamentary format used at the world championships: construction, rhetoric, steelmanning, negotiation, clarity, and composure under pressure.
Debate finale at the famed Oxford Union
The finalists speak in the chamber where prime ministers, presidents, and Nobel laureates have taken questions since 1823.
The debating competition runs across the programme. The rest of the cohort sits as the floor, and points of information come from anybody willing to stand. The motion is announced fifteen minutes before the debate, so no speech can be written in advance.
Debating at the Oxford Union was a huge step for my confidence and self-portrayal.
The Oxford Global Forum
A guest lecture series: world-class experts come to Oxford to speak on the subjects they work in, and the whole cohort attends.
Each lecture ends with questions from the floor. Students read on the topic beforehand, and two of the lectures set the brief for the Future Challenge.
- 01 · Who governs new technology?
- 02 · The limits of biotechnology
- 03 · Space and the next economy
- 04 · Energy after fossil fuels
- 05 · The health of democracies
- 06 · Power and world order