Staff Spotlight: Patrick Keefe

Patrick currently works as an Admissions Executive for Oxford Royale Academy. He is responsible for liaising with potential clients and setting up reservations onto the company's academic program. In the summer months, he works as an on-site Assistant Program Director, responsible for running the pastoral staff and cultural enrichment facets of the Balliol College campus.

My best travel memories are usually bound-up in choir tours, including trips to the East Coast of America, Beijing and Langzhou, and much of Europe. My favorite travel memory has to be travelling across Australia, aged 2, following my dad filming wildlife documentaries for Channel 4. Such amazing scenery and animals - it etched itself even into the memory of a 2 year-old.

I've developed a greater understanding of global cultures and traditions, I've improved my French, become better at ironing shirts (for meeting with high-profile parents!), and worked alongside some of the most fascinating young minds of today. My interpersonal skills have certainly developed, but as any of the students will tell you, my sense of humor definitely hasn't.

One student told me they returned because of how we treated them when they missed home. Eventually, they said, they stopped feeling homesick because ORA became a new home. Someone pass me the tissues...! Sometimes its the little things we do to enhance a student experience that stick with them, and you never know how much one little gesture can mean to someone.

Definitely the Mastering Automotive Engineering Course. Designing and building a Caterham car in Oxford for 6 weeks - so cool! A real project to work on amongst your peers - surely learning collaboratively is more fun than studying alone. And at the end of the course, not only would you have ACE grades, you'd also be able to say you'd built a car.

Oxford Royale Academy is a bastion of internationalism in an increasingly divided world. I am proud of the company's commitment to bringing young people together with the shared goal of intellectual progress, across cultural boundaries. I hope that the young people who enter our Alumni Community will always share the principle of international cooperation that they foster with us at ORA.

Honestly, a true devotion to the product. If the courses we produce are world-class and we make ourselves the best summer school possible, the students will come. I include within that the whole product - the branding, the content, and the delivery. If the company serves the product, the product will serve the company 10-fold.