Oxford Day 7

Today we began the Global Apprentice segment of our trip. We are to be given challenges by international corporations which we must solve in teams, sorta like the show “The Apprentice.” The winning team at the end of the 3 challenges will receive a scholarship and the top individual performer will receive an internship with an international fortune 500 company. It’s pretty neat.

So today we went to our first company to learn about them and receive our challenge for the week. The company is called Oxfam. It’s a nonprofit company whose mission it is to eliminate poverty and social injustice throughout the world. No small task. They do this by selling things in retail outlets which they receive as donations. They raise about 200 million pounds a year through their retail outlets and fair-trade sales and fundraising, so it’s a pretty large company. They want our groups to help them evaluate their communications between corporate headquarters and the various shops they have scattered about, and then we are supposed to give them solutions to enhance their communications and try to increase their market share while we’re at it. It’s fairly daunting but should be a ton of fun. We are going to start in the morning by visiting some of the locations and interviewing the managers, volunteers, workers, and customers. Should be a blast.

I don’t really have much to add for the day. All we really did was work on our project, and I’m sure you don’t really care much about that. A big thank you to Mr. Dean McFarland for actually reading my blog. Miss ya bud.

I’m getting pretty excited about going to France this weekend. It should be very neat to see some of the key locations from WWII as well as the Eiffel Tower and such. Me and Cody are thinking about going to Italy the next weekend. Should be gorgeous this time of year.