A letter from one MPP year to the next

The class of 2025 has only just left. The group chats have thinned, understandably, to photographs of new offices and adventures, or of classmates getting together on their travels. You, the incoming cohort, are moving into a building that we called home for almost a year. It was an intensive year in a remarkable place, so I thought I would write down what the year was, and what it can be, while it is still fresh in my mind.

I am not going to tell you what is coming week by week – timetables shift, and you will hear it better from the kind people coordinating the programme. What I hope can be usefully passed on is how the MPP changes you, because much of that change happens gradually, and you might only identify the true impact afterwards.

A different way of thinking

The Oxford Master of Public Policy changes the way you argue. You stop reaching for more evidence to settle every disagreement, because you get better at recognising that opposite sides of a table can hold the same facts and simply weigh them differently. You start asking what a number is leaving out as much as whether it is correct. You ask who carries a cost, which is seldom the person who pays it. You ask what a claim is being compared against, and notice how often the honest answer is nothing much.

These questions might not look like a great deal written down, but I expect to be asking these questions for years to come. It amounts to being handed a different set of lenses. The MPP gives you new ways to approach familiar problems, changing not only what you ask, but how you ask it.

For those of us going back to the organisations that sent us to Oxford, this is particularly useful. When you already understand an organisation and how it works, a sharper question can go a long way – you can see where it applies and exactly whose desk to put it on.

But the year also gives you something harder to measure: a network of people working on public problems in very different contexts, and the confidence to draw on perspectives beyond your own.

The people who shape the experience

The people you learn alongside are a central part of what you take away from Oxford. You sit beside a polyglot who speaks and thinks in more languages than there are people around the dining table at St Hilda’s. You meet classmates whose routes to Oxford – professional, personal and geographical – are completely different from your own. And at some stage you might even compete with a friend for a place on a limited roundtable or an internship position that only one of you can have, and catch yourself hoping that they get it.

Most of the academic concepts you encounter on a policy course can exist, of course, can be found in books one could have read at home. But what the Blavatnik School of Government’s MPP adds is the opportunity to explore and apply those ideas alongside a deliberately designed collective of more than a hundred people from more than 60 countries and very different backgrounds. An idea that reaches you through one of them tends to stick. So much so that you sometimes forget that it was never yours to begin with; it was argued well enough that you could not help taking it on.

What the course, and the people who make it possible, send you home with is a clearer sense of what it might take to make a world better led, better served and better governed.

Make the most of the year

I’ll leave you with some advice.

First, attend the event that piques your interest. There are more conversations and talks here than anyone can get to, and they are where a surprising amount of the learning happens. Oxford offers an extraordinary range of opportunities to learn beyond the programme itself.

Second, write things down while they are happening – I came very close to losing the notes this letter came out of. The terms are about eight weeks long and pass remarkably quickly, and it is easy to forget the small moments and conversations that shaped your experience.

If you are reading this as somebody thinking of applying, applications for the 2027 intake are open until 2 December, and in recent years 90% of students here have held full or partial scholarships. Mine was one of them, and as a civil servant coming from limited means, I would not have been able to take up my place on the MPP without financial assistance.

To the class of 2026, enjoy the induction and the year ahead. Not everything will make sense straight away – some things only fall into place when you look back. Meet as many people as you can, make the most of the opportunities around you and stay curious. It will go by faster than you think.

Parth