It’s finally the end of term! What an exhilarating time! The last entire month has been a roller-coaster ride of the work hard play hard ethic. I knew I had to stop my weekend escapades as there were only three more weeks left till the end of term and I had a lot of coursework due for two of my modules which would eat away my time. It was time to work hard.

For my databases module, my teammates and I had to finish my carpooling web application and make sure it fulfilled certain requirements. This coursework was due on March 15, on the second last Friday of lectures. The entrepreneurship coursework was due the following Thursday. I had to submit a full-fledged portfolio consisting of a business venture proposition with a business plan, financials, marketing research, prototypes, customer development, pitch video, and powerpoint deck for investors. Needless to say, I worked every waking hour for the next two weeks trying to juggle different assignments and projects.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress

This Saturday morning I woke up to my alarm at 7:00 AM after it rang for almost a minute. With 4 hours of sleep, I turned it off and closed my eyes. Yet I didn’t go back to sleep, despite thinking to myself, “I have absolutely no reason to get up on a Saturday morning in this freezing weather and goto a conference in a city I’ve never been to with people I don’t know!” But it’s my subconscious that kept me from going back to sleep. I got up and took a shower as I really tried to justify to myself why I wanted to attend this conference. I really didn’t have an answer but I followed my instincts.

I had literally found out the night before around 11:00 PM that I had won a ticket to an entrepreneurship event called ‘Oxford Inspires’ by Oxford’s Saïd Business School. I won it by being one of the first people to reply to UCL Enterprise Society’s email. Who knew it pays to be attentive to your email? I had signed up for UCL Enterprise Society’s mailing list among many other clubs in an effort to become more extracurricularly involved within UCL. Earlier in the week I had gone on a cinema outing with the UCL Book Club to watch Cloud Atlas which recently came out in UK. So I’ve definitely been making progress in this effort. The UCLE officers were catching the 8:50 AM train to Oxford to attend the conference and offered to let me travel with them. I happily agreed to join them, but as you can tell, I was having serious doubts in the morning.