IEA Future Thought Leader's programme oliver

During the Easter holiday, five of our year 12 economics students were selected to attend the Institute of Economic Affairs ‘Future thought leaders programme’. The application process was competitive, with over 300 students applying to take part on this week-long course. The week was filled with an abundance of different lectures, activities and challenges, led by numerous different speakers. The week started with an ice breaker exercise named ‘speed-networking’ where you had two minutes to introduce yourself to one of the other 40 individuals on the course. I thoroughly enjoyed this task, as it was an easy way to make friends early on, thus making the week more enjoyable and interactive. Following on from this, we were presented with many different talks centred around economics; with topics ranging from ‘An introduction to Monetarism’ to ‘The economics of football’ and ‘inequality’. These were the three lectures that interested me the most, as I picked up new knowledge, on topics that I wasn’t previously interested in. For example, during the inequality lecture, Steve Davies ’Head of Education at the IEA’ explained how the majority of wealth can be traced back to 1066, when William the Conqueror gifted the land he had won to his friends. Since, little of this land has been sold and therefore the majority of ‘wealth’ (in terms of land) is still owned by their descendants. As well as being highly informative, the lectures were also highly interactive. There were questions commonly being asked, and alternative viewpoints being presented to the lecturer for them to assess.

On top of the lectures, the activities were also highly enjoyable. On the third day of the course, we were presented with a ‘values quiz’; where we had to fill out a Google forms which tested our own individual morality. Following completion, as a group, we analysed the proportions of different answers and put forward our opinions on each topic.

An example was the statements ‘capitalism benefits the wealthy more than the poor’ and ‘Deploying our military in another country is a bad idea’; where we had to give an answer along the spectrum from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. Seeing every individual’s viewpoint, along with the reason behind these viewpoints, was truly fascinating and subsequently the activity was one of the highlights of my week.

To finish of this insightful week-long internship, we all took part in a group debate that we had been planning in our breaks throughout the week. The students were split into ten teams of four, with five different statements, where one team would be assigned the job to argue ‘for’ the statement, and the others ‘against’ the statement. My team’s statement was ‘The UK central bank should continue to increase interest rates’ of which we had to argue that we agreed. Thanks to strong planning and public speaking skills, my team came out victorious against the opposition, and actually was decided (by the IEA team watching) that it was the best overall debate of the week. This was the perfect way to top off an already extremely insightful and motivating week, and I am very grateful to have been selected to attend the internship. Once again, the speakers were fantastic, and were so helpful in answering any questions that us inquisitive students had. Finally, a big thanks to Mrs Carr who made us aware of this opportunity and recommended us to this internship.