My Three-Day Accidental Social Evaluation Era at Oxford

I spent a few days at Oxford for the 2026 Oxford Reputation Symposium this August, and I stayed at New College. “New College” sounds reasonable until you learn that it is more than 600 years old. Oxford clearly has a very different standard for what counts as new.

As a Harry Potter fan, more specifically, as someone the Sorting Hat placed in Ravenclaw years ago, I was already pretty entertained just walking back and forth between New College and Saïd Business School every day. I didn’t get to see Christ Church, where some of the movie scenes were filmed, because I didn’t add any sightseeing days to the trip. My entire visit was basically business. But honestly, touring New College was already fun enough. I was also staying in an actual student room, and strangely, the old-fashioned window (pushed outward and held open with a little metal hook) felt so familiar. With the window open and the sound of leaves rustling in the wind outside, it reminded me of summer nights in the place where I lived as a child.

One slightly funny thing about going to a reputation symposium is that I have never actually thought of myself as a social evaluation scholar. Reputation? I don’t study it. Status? Nope. Legitimacy? Also no. Celebrity? Another no. I study corporate governance. So what exactly was I doing there? But after a few days of listening to people talk about social evaluations, I started to think: wait, maybe I’m not that far away. A lot of what interests me about external governance is precisely how outsiders evaluate firms, CEOs, and boards. I may not study the usual social evaluation constructs, but it seems that I have been hanging around the neighborhood.

And then there was a session organized by accounting scholars. Yeahhhhhhh. My deeply buried hardcore accounting self was suddenly very awake. I met a senior accounting scholar whose work I cite a lot and whose student’s work I also cite a lot. I genuinely never imagined I would run into him at a reputation symposium of all places. Academia can feel very siloed until suddenly people you have been citing appears in the same room.

I started with the junior scholar PDW, which gave me two rounds of feedback from six mentors in total. Six mentors on one paper is a pretty good deal. What I loved most, though, was how relaxed it all felt. Everyone was incredibly kind, and the conversations really did feel like conversations, not six senior scholars waiting for their turn to tell you what is wrong with your paper. We sat around talking through the paper, and somehow I walked away with a huge amount of feedback without ever feeling like I had just survived an academic interrogation.

I was very grateful for the opportunity to be selected as an emerging scholar and to present at the main symposium on the last day. I was also, predictably, nervous about it long before the last day arrived. I’m always nervous about presentations. Sometimes people who do not have to think much about the language side of presenting, and who also have a lot more presentation experience than I do, ask me why I get so nervous: “It’s just a presentation.” I usually try to explain it by asking whether they speak another language, and, if so, whether they have ever given a presentation in that language. That tends to make the extra layer of difficulty easier to understand. Public speaking is already one of the things people are most afraid of. It is often selected more frequently as a common fear than even death, according to the piece of hearsay I’m choosing not to fact check here. Now add being a very junior student, a non-native speaker, introverted, socially awkward, and having to explain academic research clearly in front of a room full of senior and even world-top scholars. Very relaxing!

The day before my presentation, someone offered me a simple piece of advice: just be yourself. It sounds almost too simple to be useful, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear. I think I had been spending too much energy worrying about what a good academic presenter was supposed to sound like. So the next day, I focused on making the paper as easy to understand and follow as I could, especially because I only had ten minutes. Teaching undergraduates has probably made me a little obsessed with explaining things simply. Apparently that instinct followed me all the way to Oxford, because I actually used Green Eggs and Ham in this presentation to explain one of my points. I kept the story simple, explained things the way I naturally would, and at one point used myself as the not-so-flattering example to make another point. So perhaps “just be yourself” was slightly dangerous advice after all. But I think I did well. Could I have handled some of the questions better? Definitely. Being myself, unfortunately, does not come with mastering Q&A.

I have actually wanted for a while to talk to non-native English-speaking scholars who are really good presenters and ask how they got there. How do they practice? How do they handle Q&A? Does it ever stop feeling like your brain is doing two jobs at once? But I will be ambitious and save that for another blog post. If you have made it this far and know someone I should talk to, please send me names!

Also, I genuinely want to know how other students feel about compliments after presentations. When someone tells you that you did great, what is your reaction? I know I should trust the judgment of people who have seen far more academic presentations than I have, but somehow compliments are much harder for me to process than criticism. Give me criticism and I immediately know what to do with it. Give me a compliment and my brain goes: …okay, but what does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that? Oh please, just criticize me instead.

I’m very grateful that Oxford covered my travel and accommodation. Oxford is beautiful, but Oxford is also very capable of reminding me that the British invented old money. The buildings are gorgeous. The dining halls are gorgeous. Even walking from one building to another can feel unnecessarily historic. And of course, I had to try an English breakfast. This included beans on toast, which apparently is a dish. I knew about beans. I knew about toast. I just did not know that at some point Britain had collectively decided that putting the two together deserved its own identity.

I also finally encountered the bottle caps that stay attached to the bottle. During the World Cup, I saw European visitors joking about drinking bottled water in the US while pretending the cap was still attached. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the joke. Now I do.

So that was my Oxford trip: a 10-minute presentation with a very unnecessary amount of internal drama, a heated debate at the Oxford Union that had everyone sweating (partly because of the debate, partly because there was no AC), a Harry Potter-style fancy dinner at Merton College with a French person seated on each side of me, and then beans on toast for breakfast to bring me back to earth. For a trip that was technically all business, it was a pretty memorable one.