Odyssey Fellowship 2025: Application Deadline

You will join a cohort of 24 smart, earnest, and high-expectation individuals, and students from all academic areas are encouraged to apply. The first 3 months are lightly structured, with weekly meetings to get to know your peers, and explore and discuss the curriculum (detailed below). Thereafter, you will have free rein to work on whatever you deem to be a good use of your programme time and resources. There will be standing get-togethers and dinners, and you can expect your peers to be a source of accountability, but your time and your priorities are your own. You will always be able to get guidance and help from the cohort leaders.

The Odyssey curriculum is a deep dive into the very early days of some of the groups and movements which have come to define our present. From our privileged position, their visions for the future seem obvious; we regularly fail to remember that the edifices they built over decades or millennia started as messy projects pursued by marginal people, seen by their contemporaries as unserious, cringe-worthy, radical, and dangerous. Over the first 11 weeks of the fellowship, we will be meeting as a group to discuss the ways our distance from the past might mislead us about our ability to impact the future. Our exploration of the early days of the Enlightenment, the arrival of the Counterculture, and the emergence of Cyberculture will give us stories, anecdotes, and frames with which to interpret the present, and give you more context and better judgement with which to think about your future.

The outcome of the programme is different for each fellow, but each fellow leaves equipped with a better model of the world for whatever they choose to apply themselves to. Some go straight into starting companies, while others continue through ambitious structured career paths, and some are pulled towards artistic and literary endeavours. Whatever they choose, they remain inspired by the technical, artistic, psychological, and historical ideas they encountered alongside their cohort.