This Durham first-year has beaten professional Oxbridge Economists to win a prize worth £10,000

Alice Lassman is a first-year Geography undergrad at Van Mildert, and her idea won her £10,000.

How did she do it? Amazingly, she beat world-class teams of Economists from prestigious universities across the globe, including Oxford, to come runner-up in the inaugural Indigo Prize.

The Indigo Prize was set up to incentivise researchers to find a new metric for measuring a country's economic activity more appropriate to the 21st century.

Alice beat over fifty other entrants, many of which were teams of up to ten professionals, to come runner-up.

The key to her success? There are three, she tells The Tab: her youth; her ability to visualise problems; and her focus on people as individuals.

She made her breakthrough in the waiting lounges of the world, scribbling in her notebook for two hours at a train station in Barcelona, and for nine hours on a long-haul flight from Kenya, all the while coming nearer to finding a physical concept that could illustrate her idea.

With youth on her side (she can actually understand the world of our generation), and a keen globalist, she put the individual front stage, and took it from there.

You can read Alice’s full paper here.