Rob Williams (Jurisprudence, 1983)

Rob is Chief Executive at War Child – from an early age he wanted to work in international development, and his college education and experiences helped to equip him with the necessary tools to make a difference.

I applied to Hertford from inside of a family drama. My parents had gone bankrupt and separated. We were suddenly homeless and I ended up living with my grandparents. This wasn’t the worst hard-luck story in the world but enough to leave me feeling precarious. Although I had no clear expectations of Hertford, the interview turned out to be the most intriguing conversation of my life to date, and the offer letter that followed felt like a doorway to a much better place.

I studied Law. I knew already that I wanted to be an aid worker but international development was not offered as a degree subject in 1983. From the stupendous amount of reading required, I did learn how to spot the important bits, and that’s been really useful. And then there was the boat club. I rowed in my first year, was Captain in my second year and President of the club in my third. I decided that I wanted to get as many people on the river as possible. We dialled up the fun side of the boat club, organising discos, parties, installing loud music at the boathouse. We doubled the number of rowers on the river pretty quickly and by the time I left I remember that a big proportion of Hertford undergraduates were in some kind of a crew.

So how much of that is helpful at War Child? Our job is to help children caught in war zones. We run schools in refugee camps. We help child soldiers to leave their militia groups and go back to their families. We provide psycho-social support to tens of thousands of children a year who have fled shelling, bombs and piles of rubble.

Hertford taught me how to work seriously hard. And the lawyer’s eye for the big issue helps to figure out what to do first in a crisis. More obviously, as a Chief Executive, every day I use the skills I learnt at the boat club. Being men’s Captain allowed me to practice recruiting rowers, getting them the boats and coaches they needed, agreeing what they wanted to achieve and then celebrating their successes. People, resources, goals and results: great training for future leaders.

Most of my career has been in aid, which is what I wanted to do at age 18. I’ve worked with great teams to respond to the Rwanda genocide, the Angolan civil war, Afghanistan, Sudan and now the Syria conflict. I was not a leader when I came up to Oxford and I could easily have missed that part of myself. But Hertford gave me a chance to discover it. Whilst my tutors made me think, the college boat club gave me a chance to lead. Most of all, Hertford gave me a lifeline from a difficult family situation. The sense of hope that, in my case, came in the form of an offer letter, which is something every child should have – including those who today are being pulled out from underneath the rubble.