Green Gown Awards 2018 - University of Oxford - Finalist

The University offers multiple opportunities for students to gain valuable experience for their future careers whilst studying at Oxford. Students can choose an opportunity to suit them.

Summer Internships are offered across the world in energy and environmental work areas at global consultancies, local authorities, charities, grass roots organisations and universities. Micro internships are shorter term placements for students who need to gain experience outside of term time. The Student consultancy takes a mixed cohort approach to dealing with specific issues with a range of organisations. The ‘Training Better Leaders’ programme brings together students from different disciplines to learn from sustainability practitioners and experts and apply their learning to real life problems.

This variety of channels for working on sustainability issues ensures that as wide a range of students come into contact with this programme as possible.

Top 3 learnings:

1. Sustainability skills are of great benefit to everyone’s CV. The skills needed to progress sustainability projects such as strategic negotiation, stakeholder engagement and the ability to communicate complex issues to a wide audience are transferable and will be beneficial to all careers.

2. To optimise take up of non-curriculum initiatives, we have had to offer several different ways of getting involved so that there are means to suit lots of different needs.

3. That sustainability as a topic is fascinating to a large cohort of students who are keen to grapple with complex, global issues through looking at particular areas through multiple lens and testing solutions appropriately.