Tldr: I joined EF for a 6-week sprint-internship during my university holidays. During this period I went talent scouting to Edinburgh and UCL, set up a new TI project in Oxford and pitched to around 30 society-nodes, took part in endless checkins/coffee chats, and ate way through too many cashews. Perhaps the most exciting effect EF has had on me is nurturing my appetite for being a beginner again. The details of that, below.
Qualified ambition is perhaps EF’s virtue benchmark – it tries to attract the people with obnoxiously high demands from themselves (as well as the practical determination to execute on said demands). This is no new insight – it’s EF’s brand, and anyone who ventures onto the website or spends five minutes in the office will likely confirm it. Ambition seems to be the social currency that separates the founded from the unfounded, the selected from the rejected, the excellent from the great.
Oxford too is a self-declared hub for ‘ambition’. Not that the University is particularly good at selecting for and nurturing this skill. It can simply, like many other prestigious institutions, sit back and watch as demand for its offering trumps supply by a large margin. It can then use the single-digit acceptance rate as a cue that those who tried the hardest, worked the smartest, and most efficiently gamed the system (and whose parents are at least somewhat rich, by global standards) will apply to be their students. Many of my course mates are indeed wickedly smart. Some are truly incredible. A large proportion set high goals from themselves, and have never really failed at anything they’ve tried. So Oxford and EF share this characteristic – they both attract and take pride in their members’ ambition.
After two years in Oxford, though, I can’t say I’ve achieved anything truly remarkable, to match the model for ambition the University purports. I spoke really fast at the worlds debating championships and made a magazine, but these were skills I already had, only executed at a slightly higher level now. I’ve hardly picked up an entirely new skill, nor have I started some exciting new project. There are many potential causes for this. One is the academic pace, coupled with the short terms of Oxford – hardly enough space for building.
This is a boring explanation. Another explanation is that I just wanted to have fun and hang out with friends for a turn. More believable. The most persuasive one, however, is that there is a pretty strong embarrassment about the sluggishness of being a beginner, one which Oxford (and many other prestigious universities I imagine) are particularly great at cultivating.
To join most societies, you must pass through some unnecessarily dreadful selection process where you have to show your true passion for student journalism, demonstrate how oh-so-keen-you-are-about-entrepreneurship, audition your vocal skills – or just broadly display experience in some craft, which you will have likely acquired before university. Even if you reject the ideology of student societies, you’re still subject to the environment’s gravitational pull. Whatever you choose to get yourself muddled in, you can easily find someone doing the exact same thing, far better. Most often, they’re in the same college, two staircases away. It’s Oxford, after all – of course it aggregates the best of the best. [ugh]. This environment, I believe, creates a reluctance to dip your toes into new grounds. It’s awkward being bad at something. It’s even more awkward if everyone around you seems to be great at what they do. Some people in Oxford are able to rise above these social forces – I wasn’t.
Cue EF. Which, while also filled with highly ambitious people who are experts in their fields of choice, somehow has managed the exact opposite of what I describe above. There’s a sense in which toying with rogue ideas is virtuous here. Failing is unfortunate, but also slightly cool. Rejections and interpersonal conflict are great, if actioned upon. Taking a bet and seeing what happens is exciting. Anything, anything but inertia.
It’s difficult to keep whining about how scared you are to start something from scratch when everyone around you is taking epic fails and epic wins alike, daily. People are sending one hundred emails and getting ten replies back, they deliver an awful pitch and they keep at it until it becomes sensational, they have stupid ideas, execute, and learn. Just existing in this office knocks the embarrassment out of you. Since being here, I’ve signed up for a half-marathon (I can’t run. Genuinely. But #ParisHalf2025), started teaching myself chess, and bought a french book to pick up a language I’ve always said I’d get fluent in. None of these things will be particularly consequential, nor have any hopes of looking good on my CV. And I truly, undeniably, suck at them. But they are examples of small things I’ve always sort of wanted to do, except I just wanted to be great from the get-go. That they only came after 6 weeks at EF might be correlation, not causation. But how boring that comment is. I believe EF prompted this change and I am happy in my statistical foolishness !!!
There it goes, then. I learned some stuff about tech and some more stuff about founding and also what a post seed multiple is (not really). But most of all, I developed an appetite for trying out new things, and for navigating that agonizing strait of embarrassment required for any sort of growth. EF is an ambition accelerator, yes. But even more so, it’s the place that nurtured my appetite for being a beginner again.
Farewell, for now, although I suspect I’ll keep getting on your nerves for many years to come.