6 Inspiring Student Stories

6 Inspiring Student Stories
  • Opening Intro -

    There are varying portrayals of university students: some see lazy layabouts with too much time and money on their hands, others know that it is a difficult time in which scholars need to juggle work commitments with studying and some struggle to find any direction while they are at university.

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Whether you are living at home while doing your degree or lucky enough to live in a plush Tower Bridge Apartment, sometimes motivation does not come easily to the undergraduate. Therefore, here are some stories about individuals and groups who took the bull by the horns and made a name for themselves while still leaning from their university library.

Monty Python

A group of Oxbridge students came to prominence in the 1960s via their university dramatic club. Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club (or Footlights as it is often known) helped the seminal Monty Python on their rise to prominence. It was while on tour in New York with Footlights that John Cleese, (who became acquainted with Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle at university) met animator Terry Gilliam. The group along with Terry Jones then set about changing comedy forever.

Mark Zuckerberg

The beginnings of Facebook are well document in the 2010 David Fincher film The Social Network. Psychology student Zuckerberg, a self-confessed nerd and somewhat socially awkward, launched the platform from his dorm room with the help of fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is now rare to meet anyone anywhere who does not have their own Facebook page.

Google

The other company which has so much domination over the web is Google. The search engine was started in 1996 by Standford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the premise of PageRank, an algorithm which placed importance on relevance rather than number of times of a search term appears on a site. From then on people didn’t search, they ‘googled’.

Pink Floyd

Unsurprisingly, there are a number of successful bands who formed in university. As well as psychedelic trail-blazers ‘Floyd, Coldplay and Pulp in the UK, and Pixies and REM formed in US institutions. All those afternoons off lectures could be used to read in the library or you could start a musical revolution.

Time Magazine

The first weekly news magazine in the US, Time, was started in 1923 by Yale students Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. In an age when print is supposedly dead, the magazine has a readership of 25 million people and is a benchmark of quality journalism.

WordPress

Perhaps not as visible, but undoubtedly as influential as the two other internet-based businesses on this list, WordPress was started in 2003 by a student at the University of Washington. Matt Mullenweg’s company now powers 15% of the top one million most-trafficked websites on the internet. Not bad for a Political Science drop-out.

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