Ashley Buckingham  ’23 spent two weeks across the pond this summer studying at Oxford University in a pre-college program as part of her Martin Nicholson Scholar stipend. Buckingham took advantage of majoring in business, banking, and markets and minoring in journalism.

The business class focused on entrepreneurial-style businesses, where the students visited local businesses daily. Buckingham and a fellow student visited a winery, spoke to the owners, and produced a profit and loss statement for them at the end of their visit. Her journalism classes which met less frequently, tackled current events especially centered around Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation, which occurred two days after Buckingham’s arrival in England. The class compared British tabloids vs. American press and how they covered Johnson’s resignation and wrote about the same story differently. After the class, the budding journalists would go to a local market and conduct man-on-the-street interviews to gauge people’s reactions to the political situation. Toward the end of the class, for a final project, the group produced a newspaper, and Buckingham interviewed and wrote a story about the two American Rhodes Scholars who were studying at Oxford.

One aspect Buckingham enjoyed about the program was that her classes were taught by professionals: one a business owner in China and the other a journalist who writes for The New York Times and is currently writing a book. Buckingham appreciated getting first-hand experiences from these teachers so she could better explore and understand her fields of interest.