Wolfson Plans & Prospects 2019

Chairing the General Meeting
the transition –and then reassure students and others that
changes were being made in their best interests. It was
quite challenging.”
A GREAT LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Everyone agrees that being GM Chair is a great learning
experience. “Wolfson consists of a fairly radical student
population and my role was to translate what they wanted
to Governing Body”, says Tabassum. “Being able to
communicate across these two groups was a valuable
lesson for my working life. It required planning and I really
learnt how to organise my time.”
“GM Chairs are often involved in
interview panels for senior positions,
something that is quite unique among
Oxford colleges.”
“The capability I’ve gained to represent unheard voices is
something I’ve found very rewarding”, says Akash. “And
learning how to manage different stakeholders in College is
an important part of my personal development.”
MAYSA FALAH
Maysa graduated from the University of Science and
Technology in Jordan with a degree in pharmacy. She
came to Oxford for her MSc degree in the Department
of Pharmacology, where she studied mechanisms of
depression in Parkinson’s disease. For her DPhil project she
investigated the excitotoxic role of NMDAR hyperfunction
in human hippocampal sclerosis, a collaboration between
the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and the
Department of Pharmacology. She is now working as a
postdoctoral researcher in pharmacology and a tutor of
medicine, remaining in Oxford.
Maysa: I invested a lot of time in researching the different
colleges. I chose Wolfson because it’s a graduate college
and it provides plenty of accommodation, not just in the
first year. And graduates are the core of the College so I
knew that my chance of meeting similar minded people was
higher. And what surprised me was the location – it’s as if
you’re in the countryside but close to the centre.
TABASSUM RASHEED
Tabassum read for a degree in PPE from St John’s, Oxford
and initially thought that was enough of academia. However,
her desire to work in the third sector led her to return to
Oxford for an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies with Arabic,
where she focused her research on the emerging modern
art scene in the Gulf states. On graduating, she worked
for the anti-corruption NGO Transparency International,
specialising on countering corruption in the defence sector.
Tabassum joined the UK Civil Service in 2015, and has
served in a variety of roles in the UK and abroad. She
currently works for HM Revenue & Customs.
Tabassum: I ended up at Wolfson by accident, and having
gone to a more traditional college for my undergraduate
studies, it was quite a culture shock. What has really stuck
with me was the number of role models I found there. There
were so many remarkable academics who all pitched in
to college life and consciously got involved in making the
community around them a better place for everyone. And I
have a lot of fond memories of lounging around on punts or
by the harbour!
WOLFSON COLLEGE OXFORD . PLANS & PROSPECTS . 2019 . 15