Archive for March, 2013

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.