SCIO is delighted to announce Summer Programme 2025’s Prize winners. The prizes are awarded to students who demonstrate academic excellence.
The summer term’s awardees include:
Alumni Prize
- Morgan Abbott
Academic Prizes
- Mac Messer
- Anna Camille Floyd
Prize winners shared a bit about their work and the reasons why they find it important…
- Mac Messer (Covenant College, GA)
Studying in Oxford for SCIO’s summer programme was challenging and beautiful. As an engineering student, I began my coursework in Creative Writing and Oxford and the Pursuit of Beauty feeling intimidated and slightly inadequate. However, I soon began to enjoy the creative and reflective process of writing prose and poetry and loved the experience of examining artistic and architectural philosophy (especially Ruskin!). My creative works and tutorial essays took up substantial time but were only a part of my daily rhythms for that month. My days of commuting from The Vines, studying in the Radcliffe Camera, stopping by Pusey House, making dinner, worshiping Jesus, and praying, all with my faithful, intellectual, and wonderful new friends, made that month one of joy, growth, and wonder!
- Morgan Abbott (Northwest University, WA)
I really loved my experience studying in Oxford! One of the most meaningful aspects of my experience this summer was approaching my classes with curiosity because it helped me to grow. I took Contemporary British Culture because I was curious about England, and I wrote one of my tutorials on the 2020 Brexit because I wanted to learn more about the issue. In that paper I even tried something new by including informational charts and graphs. During my tutorial, I practiced opening my mind to my tutor’s input while also acting bold enough to defend my own ideas. In sum, trying new things, balancing the tutorial tension, and practicing curiosity helped me grow immensely as a thinker.
To future SCIO scholars, I would encourage you to be curious! Ask thoughtful questions, read the books, taste the food, the tea, the cakes, walk through the forests, travel to London, laugh in the kitchen, listen to the choirs, and read Scripture in cathedrals. Oxford is a wonderful place, if only you are curious and open to the possibilities.
- Anna Camille Floyd (Lipscomb University, TN)
My time in Oxford with SCIO was as close to perfect as I could have hoped for. I am so grateful to have been a part of the SCIO Summer Cohort. I had the opportunity to study under Dr. Richard Lawes in his Psychology and Literature course. The course pushed me to evaluate texts from a lens I was not familiar with and to actively resist reductionist interpretations of literature. I also studied nineteenth-century architecture and art criticism with Dr. Jonathan Kirkpatrick. In this course I studied the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. My research focused on aestheticism and the philosophical and moral implications of art itself. I am grateful to both of my tutors for their instruction and the entire SCIO staff for their hospitality. More than anything, I am grateful for the community I got to be a part of. I will forever treasure and thank God for the people he brought into my life because of SCIO. The conversations and laughs I shared with my cohort were truly a gift from the Lord and made the entire SCIO experience more beautiful.
SCIO wishes the prize winners a very happy and successful future!