Oxford Inspires my Saturday

Written by Waseem Ahmad. Posted in Blog, Computer Science, Studying Abroad

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress

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.

A Week of Travel

Written by Waseem Ahmad. Posted in Blog, Studying Abroad

livemusicI’ve never immersed myself in a culture as deeply as I have in the past few days. It’s amazing how much you can learn about the history, tradition, and culture of a place simply by looking around and observing subtle details. You can gain a whole lot more by reading local literature which takes the places around you and gives them a rich and complex past with a set of characters you can relate to. This pretty much describes my past few days travelling through Ireland with my buddy Tim. His interest in visiting local book shops and picking up books written by the local authors piqued my curiosity and I decided to grab a few myself. The experience of reading books that are set in the place you are travelling is really amazing, you can imagine the details in the book far more vividly and find it far more interesting.