The Oxford Experience for Grades 8-9

Students are introduced to the world of corporate finance and its primary institutions through dynamic workshops and exercises. They cover 21st-century financial realities for budding entrepreneurs and multinational corporations. Major course projects include real-life case studies, a stock exchange investment game, and the design of a theoretical start-up venture.

Students compose fiction and poetry under the guidance of a published author, with Oxford's rich literary history as their inspiration. They experiment with new forms and styles of writing. Published authors give workshops in which students learn about the creative process and the practicalities of publication. Students develop a portfolio of their best writing and collaborate to design, edit, and publish a literary magazine.

Through workshops, debates, and visits to police stations and criminal courts, students explore individual and social theories of crime, philosophies of punishment, criminal profiling, incident analysis, and basic forensic science. They consider the causes of crime, the influence of the media upon crime, and issues of race, inequality, and gender within the context of the British and American criminal justice systems.

The course will begin by introducing students to the approaches and techniques required to carry out a successful Engineering research project. At the same time, the instructor will propose a range of topics students might wish to concentrate on. Students will finalize their choices – in concertation with the instructor – at the end of the first week, after which the instructor will provide them with the materials required to carry out their research. The students will work on their projects, under their supervisors, during the morning class though, as the program progresses, several afternoons will also be set aside to enable them to complete them. The results will be presented, conference-style, to the team. Research projects might include designing a campus energy monitoring system, researching the feasibility of recycling bottles into clothing, analyzing how blade-shape affects the power output of small-scale wind turbines, analyzing the impact of additive manufacturing on aerospace component design, evaluating small-scale designs for capturing CO₂ directly from air, researching storage and transport challenges of hydrogen as a clean fuel. Naturally, wherever possible, our supervisors will do their best to accommodate specific interests.

Students discover how biotechnology combines principles of biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering to create the products, processes, and technologies of the future. Through experiments and seminars they engage with pharmaceuticals breakthroughs, genetic diagnoses and therapies, sustainable biofuels, and genetically modified foods. Students also explore the social, ethical, and economic implications of biotechnology.

This hands-on course introduces students to key aspects of medicine and modern medical practice. Combining specialist lectures with experiments and class discussions, students learn the main principles of human anatomy and physiology, the pathology and significance of certain diseases, the main challenges that medical science faces today, and the variety and changing nature of careers in medicine.

Photographers of all levels of expertise spend much of their time in the field, pursuing assignments designed to improve their landscape, portraiture, art, and fashion photography skills. Students exhibit their best work at the end of the program. They require their own DSLR camera with USB cable, charger, manual, and at least one 8 GB memory card.

Oxford's famous undergraduate degree, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE), is adapted for our students. They examine the governing institutions and policies of modern Britain and contrast the British, American, European, and East Asian approaches to the challenges of government. Students engage in practical exercises, such as a fantasy stock portfolio competition, and complete the course by participating in a mock Parliament or a program MUN.

This syllabus is drawn from the sort of course typically taught on MBAs. Students learn to organize their lives, to create realistic schedules, to manage timetables, and to define priorities. They learn how to collect and manage information, how to take notes, and how to condense and file them. They learn how to build their profiles to leverage their growing experience and expertise as they take their first steps into higher education.

Students explore major debating styles and strategies, engage in daily speaking exercises, orations, and dialogues, and prepare and present regular debates. The culmination of the course is a formal debate in the historic debating chamber of the Oxford Union Society - founded in 1823, it is one of the oldest university debating societies in the world.

Beginners and more advanced students receive instruction in a variety of media. They spend much of their time outside, sketching medieval towers, capturing pastoral landscapes, practicing their portrait skills, or discovering masterpieces in locations such as the Christ Church Picture Gallery. Students exhibit their best pieces at the end of the program.