Four days. Nearly 30 student-led events. One impossible-to-choose timetable. Welcome to the NLCS Summer Festival: From challah-making to lung dissections, bio-architecture to Brainwaves (our oracy showcase starring ankles, pop music and everything in between), it was a joyful whirlwind of curiosity.
The usual timetable gave way this week to the Summer Festival, a student-led event featuring 175 themed workshops across a wide range of subjects, all organised by our Year 12 society leads. On Thursday alone, more than 30 sessions ran simultaneously, covering topics from medical science to political theory.
In Film and Media Society, students watched Fantastic Mr Fox before designing their own Wes Anderson-inspired characters, drawing on the director’s visual style. The Medical Sciences Society explored the history of surgical practice in 175 Years of Lung Surgery, using anatomical dissection to consider how understandings of the human body have changed over time. In the art studios, The Big Draw invited students to respond to the theme of curiosity with pencil and paper, favouring process over finished product.
In mathematics, students encountered the Catalan Numbers. They examined its formation and discovered its relevance in areas such as combinatorics and geometry. The workshop, titled ‘What Comes Next?’, revealed how abstract patterns can reappear across mathematical fields.
Several workshops asked students to think forward. The Feminist Society considered the long view in ‘What Will Feminism Mean in 2200?’, while Philosophy Society invited participants to reconsider what it means to ask questions at all. History Society put key ideas on trial, and Psychology ran a treasure hunt that charted how theories of the mind have shifted over 175 years.
Elsewhere on campus, Engineering society worked with wood, Physics extracted DNA from strawberries, and the Humanities brought historical and cultural traditions into the present. From Henna designs to the economics of inflation and mock UN crisis negotiations, the week demonstrated how intellectual curiosity can be both rigorous and inventive.
The festival offered no prizes and no grades. Its success lay in the quality of engagement, the seriousness of play, and the willingness of students to approach familiar subjects from unfamiliar angles.
