A week has passed since I moved back into Oxford for the Laidlaw research summer project. In all honesty, it felt really odd to return so soon after exams. To be among familiar surroundings with a completely different daily routine felt strange. Looking back, it’s been a good week full of new experiences, hard work, plenty of sunshine (although, maybe too much at times), dire hay fever, and all with great company throughout.

This summer, I am working with a team to explore how different thematic extra-curricular activities affect academic and social wellbeing among students. Initially, we faced a few challenges in planning our research: we found it hard to narrow our scope considering our limited time frame for this project, and it was difficult to know what data we should be measuring. However, we managed to settle on a shared interpretation of the research brief, and have set clear deadlines for data collection, data analysis, and the writing of our findings.

As a music student, I have naturally always been scared of anything numerical or scientifically ‘objective’. Luckily, our group is made up of students from multiple disciplines such as psychology, PPE, and human sciences. It’s been fascinating to see how many different perspectives each person brings to a single issue. Through this project, I do hope to push myself past my personal comfort zone of solely reading and synergising literature.

On Saturday, I volunteered at the Leys Festival alongside some other scholars. It was a lovely opportunity to connect with the wider Oxford community beyond the university bubble. The music was great and the food was especially amazing, featuring cuisine from a diversity of places that reflected the historic migration patterns of Blackbird Leys. A particularly unexpected challenge was supervising the bouncy castle. Trying to catch cheeky kids queue-jumping felt like an endless game of whack-a-mole. 

The other scholars on this project have been so incredibly kind and friendly. I’m looking forward to the weeks ahead – more walks through University Parks, more sunny days (although, hopefully not too sunny), and more group research sessions sat inside Christ Church Meadows, surrounded by beautiful greenery and cows.