Oxford Guild Online Events, Support & Offerings during the Covid-19 Pandemic

In these difficult and unprecedented times resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic that have led to significant disruption across all societies and meant that university terms have moved virtual, The Oxford Guild is determined to support students as much as possible and make sure nobody is left behind. This is more crucial than ever before given the unique circumstances in such an unusual time when students’ educations and lives have been disrupted and many have had internship and job offers cancelled, made virtual or postponed. Given Oxford has cancelled all exams for almost all first years (with just a couple of exceptions) and most second and penultimate year students have no exams anyway, and given that teaching schedules have been reduced significantly as well, students have more free time than before. We want to help add structure to their days (without traditional university timetables it is easy to fall into a spiral) and give them a taste of what a normal term in Oxford would have been like with regular events in the evenings, and positively impact their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. The unfolding global economic crisis which is set to lead to a worse recruitment landscape than 2008, means that more and more students of all years, backgrounds and courses are actively thinking about their career prospects, applications for roles and their futures in general. In these circumstances, it is crucial to provide them with opportunities to think more about their career paths and options and hold online events that are interesting and add value to their commercial awareness and knowledge and help them develop skills.

We have arranged a huge range of offerings and online events from high profile and topical speakers, fascinating panels and invaluable webinars from our partner companies and experts to conferences, online hackathons, challenges/competitions and much more! Unlike other societies who normally quieten down after Hilary Term and do only a couple of events at most in Trinity anyway, we’ve always had busy Trinity Terms and even Summer holidays with many offerings for students each week. We plan to increase this further as we really believe that it is a great time to get students to think about their long term careers plans and skills development and how best to use the vacations. All our online events will be interactive with Q&A sessions and we seek to make them as close as possible to real life in person events. Our upcoming speakers involve leaders from almost every field including major CEOs, founders, economists, philanthropists, politicians, artists, musicians, actors, sportspeople Nobel Prize winners, world leaders and more. We are building on our renowned Infinity Diversity Speaker Series, Global Female Leadership Conference, Global Fintech & Blockchain Conference & Hackathon, Europe 2 Silicon Valley Trips and more, all online. Our line up lasts beyond Trinity, across the entire summer running through till term hopefully re-starts again in October. In addition to speakers, conferences and panels, it also webinars, online hackathons and challenges/competitions with our partner firms and fortnightly commercial awareness sessions all for free with expert career coaches and companies offering support including exclusive access to virtual internships and career development tools. We have opened these online offerings up further to our branches at other universities such as Cambridge and also to our partner sister societies in our Collegium Global Network that we founded and lead and which encompasses the entire Russell Group and Ivy League.

We will be posting highlight online events on this page, on our Facebook page and sending more details to our members on our mailing list. Please check back here to find out the latest and also like and follow our Facebook page and join our mailing list below.