Life at Oxford and beyond
When I first arrived in Oxford, it felt like walking into a beautiful, magical academic heaven. No matter how tough my MSc course in International Health and Tropical Medicine got, it felt like walking on sunshine every day. I made many beautiful memories in Oxford, and it was more than I could ever dream of.
Grace on Matriculation Day
On my first day, I walked into the men's bathroom at my college, Teddy Hall. In my defense, I didn’t notice the sign because I was still dazed that a little Malawian Disney girl like me found a college with a ‘wishing well’.
During our Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Moral Philosophy seminars, I remember how my cohort bonded over a late night of chicken wings in Jericho and we’ve been great friends from all the corners of the world ever since.
As school got more intense, I was always rushing somewhere and I couldn’t have had it any other way. I went to as many formal dinners as I possibly could with one at Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. Honestly, I still think my college has the best food.
I went to as many talks as my legs could carry me to and even had the rule to do something different every Friday to take in everything Oxford had to offer. I went to sexy sub fusc and Afrobop parties at Linacre College with my friend Nicole, stood in line for two hours to get into a reggaetón party at Freuds, blacked out at Hanks after my final exams, and took way too many pictures of the Radcliffe camera.
Dinner with the WHT cohort
I got to watch the seasons change through the trees when I walked through University Parks to class every day. When it snowed, we (a class of mostly tropical students) ran out of the lecture to play in our first-ever snowfall. We left our lecturer utterly confused at why we were making little ‘snowmen’ on the balcony as though it would never snow again.
Wrapping up my stay in Oxford was difficult for me because I couldn’t resolve my feelings for everything I loved and the person I became in Oxford. How do you top Oxford? It’s this magical place you want to stay in forever. When I didn’t get funding for my DPhil offer, it felt like the magic was leaving me. I wanted my Oxford experience to mean something, but I didn’t know what that was going to be.
I got interested in health policy during my Master's degree and I thought of studying in the United States. I was always conflicted because I strongly believed that I wanted to work on African health systems and I wanted to conduct Africa-based research to do that.
So, when I got to Malawi, I thought I would contribute to African health systems by becoming an expert in child health in Africa. For two years, I worked as a clinician at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. Although I was happy to work with children, I always wondered if I would ever get that ‘Oxford Magic’ back. I wasn’t completely certain of my path and so many other events in my life unfolded that made me feel like, perhaps, I was never magical to begin with.
I was becoming a shadow of my ‘Oxford self’. I shunned public speaking and became shy and disengaged. During my WHT cohort’s annual Zoom catch-up, we were vulnerable with each other and shared the ‘growing pains’ of our different life experiences. I was comforted to see that we are all learning to find our place in the world, even though it doesn’t always look like what we pictured it would be.
Concurrently, while in Malawi, I was also lucky to work with Dr Pui-Ying Iroh Tam at Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust. She let me explore my interest in health policy and we published a paper analyzing the health policy response to COVID-19 in Malawi. This was so formative to me because she connected me to someone who suggested that I consider health economics to inform health policy.
As life would have it, I later enrolled into a Health Economics PhD program at the University of Bergen in Norway. This experience had me moving to a country with more snow than I ever imagined I would ever see. More importantly, I realized that my project fits into my dream of providing expertise to inform health policies and strengthen African health systems. My work applies health economics in child health in three African countries (Malawi, Kenya and Uganda) and, contributes to how their governments and the international development community can better structure health financing for children in Africa.
Grace visiting Oxford after three years
As I started engaging with the world again, I realized that perhaps the magic was always in me. In 2022, I was named as a Women in Africa young leader and continuously engage with policymakers from the French government on the priorities for health care in Malawi. This was a little win that helped me realize that I was on the right track. This year, three years later, I went to visit Oxford again. I am happy to report that Oxford is still Magical, but so am I.
