SCIO is delighted to announce the Scholars’ Semester in Oxford de Jager prize winners for fall 2014. The de Jager prizes are funded by a generous donation to SCIO from Geoffrey and Caroline de Jager who have a long standing commitment to encouraging excellence in education and scholarship.
MT14 prize winners
Top line, left to right: Joel Sams, Chance Gamble, Paul Stapleton. Middle line, left to right: Emily Sargent, Lydia Good, Abigail Storch, Samuel Ernest. Bottom Line, left to right: Claire Lambert, Graham Warnken, Emily Lund
These students showed exceptional academic performance in the following aspects of the programme
Two of the students reflect on their time in Oxford below
The dreaming spires, the cyclists dashing between buses and down cobbled side streets, the late-night kitchen conversations over mugs of tea, my pounding heart as I walked into my first tutorials: Oxford was a dream I was privileged enough to live out for a few wondrous months. Yes, I was stressed and stretched. But I was also blessed to be alongside some of the brightest minds and biggest hearts I could have ever hoped to know, fellow scholars intent on pursuing knowledge and truth. SCIO taught me a new definition of ‘learning’, one that reemphasized not only the power of the written and spoken word, but also the power of living in community.
Emily Lund
During my two terms at Oxford, I bought too many books at Blackwell’s, performed with the Oxford University Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre, sipped flat whites at Turl Street Kitchen (before they were cool in America), and, yes, read and wrote many, many pages. SCIO is for academically inclined people what an infinite gift card to a toy shop is for a child; it not only opens your eyes to things you didn’t know could be possible, it opens doors—to the Bodleian Library, to lecture halls in which world-class scholars speak, to relationships with extremely knowledgeable tutors, and to a life in which faith, scholarship, and community challenge and bolster each other. I will forever be grateful for the blessing SCIO has been for me.
Samuel Ernest
Photography by Jonathan Kirkpatrick www.zeuxisphotography.com/