Skollar 2007/08
Prior to accepting the Skoll Scholarship and coming to Oxford, Christie George worked for six years at Women Make Movies, a non-profit media arts organisation and the world's leading distributor of films by and about women. At Women Make Movies, she played a key role in helping set strategic direction for the organisation, managing sales and marketing efforts for the company's slate of independent films and launching new initiatives, including curating and releasing "The Girls Project", a critically acclaimed series of films celebrating girls' lives around the world and one of the most successful collections in the organisation's history.
Christie decided to do an MBA in order to develop the management, finance and leadership skills she needed to have more professional impact. The Saïd Business School's special focus on social entrepreneurship and its expertise in media and communications management made the Oxford MBA programme an ideal fit for her interests and experience. "I also knew I wanted to have a more international career," Christie says. "The Oxford brand resonates everywhere in the world, and I knew it would serve me well. More important was the opportunity to engage with students from all over the world."
"Oxford is quite simply a surreal and magical place to spend a year," Christie reflects. Her achievements during her year in Oxford included: participating in an Entrepreneurship Project to create an online platform to connect teachers and students – a project that was shortlisted as a finalist in the Saïd Business School Venture Fund Competition; and winning the £10,000 Saïd Prize awarded annually to the best MBA student in recognition of her academic achievement and broader contribution to the School.
Other highlights of Christie's year were the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship 2008 which featured speakers including Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Jody Williams, and Jeff Skoll; and the summer Strategic Consulting Project (SCP) which offers small teams of MBA students the chance to work together with organisations on real world consulting projects. "For the SCP, I travelled to Tanzania with a team of four students," Christie says. "We served as consultants to a social enterprise called APOPO that trains sniffer rats to save human lives through landmine detection and more recently through the detection of tuberculosis. We spent six weeks working with the organisation on business planning and the evaluation of new commercial applications for its unique proposition. It was undoubtedly the most rewarding aspect of the programme for me."
Having completed her MBA, Christie is currently building a team and writing a business plan for a crowd-funded media tool for social enterprises that she began developing in her social enterprise design class.
"Due in large part to the conversations I've had with members of the Oxford network, I have expanded my view of what's possible for my career. Specifically, the scope of my ambition is now global. People have been extraordinarily generous with their contacts, and I've been appreciative of the wide range of possibilities that have opened up to me as a result of going to Oxford," Christie says. "The Skoll network is full of people who are up to something. As we move forward with our own ventures, there's a community of smart, motivated, entrepreneurial rock stars who will help along the way."