Class of 2016: Koza and Walter

By Walter Kerr
Oppidan co-founder

A decade on from Oppidan’s first mentoring session, I sat down with a student there from the start.

Last week, Oppidan turned ten. To honour the occasion, we’ve made a series of films – interviews with students from the class of 2016.

The first students with whom we worked, ten years on. The first film is mine. And it’s with Koza.

A nine-year-old, a 22-year-old, and a so-called office

I was 22. Koza was nine. Henry and I had an idea, and a handful of families were willing to give us a go.

I was running sessions from my parents’ house – our “so-called office.” My dad would occasionally wander through in his dressing gown and have to be ushered back upstairs.

The brief was his 11+ exams, the context a series of previously bad tutors and a competitive school landscape that required somebody to focus on his points of difference.

We did interview prep. We did verbal and non-verbal reasoning. But we also did a lot of other things that would have looked, to an outsider, like we were just messing about.

Twenty minutes of VR. Then twenty minutes preparing for a presentation on the Battle of Gallipoli. A bit of skateboarding down the street. Then back inside for some lateral thinking questions. It was probably chaotic. But it was never boring. But it worked. As Koza put it: “They weren’t boring tutor-style lessons. It wasn’t like I was forcing myself to come along.”

Koza shortly later received a place to study at Eton College, from where he graduated in 2024.

From apostrophes to artificial intelligence

While at Eton, he had gone to every computer science society talk and, at the end of each one, asked the speaker if he could intern with them. He was thirteen. Most of them said no. But one said yes, and Koza spent six weeks of his summer commuting to London five days a week to work at a startup. When that founder moved to Apple, he messaged Koza and offered him an internship. At Apple. As a teenager.

And now? Now Koza is working on something called organoid intelligence, involving using real human neurons to power artificial intelligence.

I tried to claim some credit. Was there any correlation between the punctuation work we’d done (Eton has a fiendish SPAG exercise at the beginning of the test) and his Apple internship? “My SPAG was immaculate,” he said. “They commented on it in my interview.”

Thinking about how to think

“Interviews and interview prep taught me how to think about how to think,” he said. “Before mentoring, I never really took a step back and thought as intentionally about the decisions I made.”

“That reasoning and that confidence, I think Oppidan gave me that,” he told me. “And I would tell my ten-year-old self to never feel ashamed of it.”

Why we made this film

Oppidan has changed enormously since those early sessions in my parents’ living room. We work with families across the UK, the US, Thailand and South Korea now. We’ve built credible mentoring programmes around character and skills, around communication, academic goals, and future planning that help a great many young people. We have a network of brilliant mentors, a team I am incredibly proud of, and a community of families who trust us with the thing that matters most to them.

Koza is proof, I hope, that there’s merit to it. To the value of a mentor in a young person’s life. I hope Koza will come back to be a mentor one day. Perhaps within the next 10 years.

Happy 10th Birthday to Oppidan.