Hamza

Reflecting on my journey, if I had to credit two traits for getting me to Oxford, they’d strangely be naïvety and inexperience.

In my early years, my life was confined to the small city of Sialkot, Pakistan. Inexperience was my weapon, for it allowed me to work ‘foolishly’ in my small bubble without completely grasping the full-scale of my competition. Naïvety was my strength, for it encouraged me to take a grand total of 10 A Level subjects to feed my curiosity about the world. Knowing less was probably my greatest advantage. In a bigger city like Lahore, there would have been countless voices warning me of the risks of such experimentation, and—perhaps rightly so—advising me to nip my plans in the bud. Fast forward two years, I ended up scoring the highest in A Levels in my country, with an additional first place in A Level Economics.

Then my bubble burst. From a small city in Pakistan, I found myself holding an offer to my dream university, Oxford, to read Economics and Management. But now I couldn’t hide behind naïvety and inexperience. No longer did I have the luxury of being an ‘underdog’, relishing in my victories as they came but associating any potential failures with the shortcomings of the little world I called home. At Oxford, I was studying with the best of the best, with unbounded access to a breadth of resources one could only imagine.

The weight of such a transition was perhaps my toughest challenge. My first year was marked with self-doubt. Oxford’s all-or-nothing assessment style, where the degree hinges on final exams across the last two weeks, only amplified the pressure. At times I feared my story would end, at the risk of sounding cheesy, in the classic Icarus-ian fashion, one where I flew too close to the sun and ‘collapsed’.

Amid this shift, Harris Manchester College became my anchor. As a mature and close-knit college, HMC provided an environment where tutors genuinely cared and peers supported one another. The warmth of the community reminded me of home and helped me find my footing in what initially felt like an intimidating world. What made the difference was the encouragement I found within HMC’s walls: late-night conversations in the library, reassuring words from tutors who saw potential in me even when I doubted it, and friends who reminded me that Oxford was as much about growth as it was about grades. 

It was in my final year that I learned to build perseverance. I realised that even though I had various accolades to show for myself, I had never truly built confidence in myself. I trained myself to filter out the chaotic noise, to resist every instinct telling me I’m not ‘cut out’ for these leagues. This resilience led me to take the finals head-on and graduate with first-class honours. Beyond the surface of grades and rankings, the real win for me was silencing the voice that said I couldn’t.

In my earlier life, naivety and inexperience were perhaps my biggest strengths, but resilience in the face of pressure is now my greatest one—a strength I found within the walls of Harris Manchester, where I learned that true resilience is built in community, not solitude.

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