On Wednesday the 20th of November, a group of Year 12 and 13 students went on a Economics trip to Bristol. Having met at 5:30 in the morning, 24 students and 3 accompanying teachers set off for a 3 day Economics festival in the UK, hosted at WeTheCurious.
Upon arriving, however, there was excitement even before going to the venue. We had the tremendous opportunity to visit Aardman Studios, the name behind childhood classics such as Shaun the Sheep. The company were kind enough to show us around their company, explaining their business model, how Netflix and other streaming services have changed the market, and how they approach new projects.
After having had an amazing time at Aardman, we heading to the the venue for the first forum. Over the course of the first 2 days, we attended 7 forums and 2 keynote speeches on topics ranging from the Green Economy to politics, from Big Tech to social media, and from inequality to the future of capitalism.
The conference was extremely educational, providing new insights onto the subject and providing a kick-board for deep conversations that we had among each other. The enlightening experience gave us a greater understanding of how economics pervades our every day life, and how trans-disciplinary approaches can help provide solutions to the complex issues faced by our world.
The third and final day of the conference was hosted by the University of Bristol. It had organized 2 school events. The first was a model auction that made each of the 40 teams pretend they were a restaurant. Each team had a budget of 2500 which it could bid for ingredients required to make menus. The team with the greatest profit won.
The second had each team of 5 people try to design a new way to measure progress. The concept was to move away from only using GDP and reevaluating what our society wants to achieve in the future. At the end of the hour, the posters were evaluated by a team of judges.
It was then announced that LGB was one of 2 teams that had tied for first place!
Overall, the experience was a very enriching and educational trip, full of relevant information about both students wishing to pursue Economics and those who simply want to understand the world better.
It is definitely a trip I would recommend.
