In December 2025, Owen stood on the starting line of the England Schools Cross Country National Finals as part of the first team in his school’s history to qualify. The course was muddy and unforgiving, the kind of race he describes as mentally consuming, where perseverance matters as much as speed. His team finished 19th out of 27, placing them among the top 20 in the country. The result took a few minutes to run and years to earn.
Owen is a seventeen-year-old from south-west London who competes in the 800 meters and cross country. He is also writing an independent economics research paper and finishing development on EconSim, an app that teaches economic theory through simulation. On the surface, these are separate lives. Look closer, and they are the same one, built on sustained, unglamorous effort toward a result that only shows up after months of work. The distances vary. The approach does not.
Earning the Start Line
The nationals qualification did not arrive suddenly. Owen has trained with Hercules Wimbledon Athletic Club since 2024, running three to five sessions a week, and captained his school’s cross-country team in his junior year. He is a South of England Outdoor 800m U17 semifinalist and was selected to compete regionally for Surrey County in the intercounties for the 2025-26 cross-country season.
The road to the national finals ran through knockout rounds. His school’s team of four, drawn from three year groups and built through lunchtime and sports-period training, had to place among the top two at county level over five kilometers, then again at regionals. They won their county round outright and took second at regionals, becoming the first squad in the school’s history to reach nationals. The final itself was chaotic, as cross country tends to be: spikes in deep mud, runners slipping, a large crowd watching, and a scoring system in which every finishing position counts toward the team total. Holding a top-20 national placing under those conditions was, for Owen, as much a collective achievement as an individual one.
The Same Discipline, Applied to Data
The patience that distance running rewards shows up directly in Owen’s academic work. His independent research paper examines the economics of energy-efficient housing in the UK, asking whether the price premium attached to green-certified homes is evenly distributed or whether it quietly deepens inequality. Data collection is complete, and the paper is now in its writing phase, a substantive undertaking for a student his age.
The methodology traces back to the University of Chicago’s Pathways in Economics summer program, where Owen studied field experiments under Dr. Min Sok Lee. The program’s experimental economics module pushed him to interrogate the difference between correlation and causation and to watch for selection bias in his own data, questions that shaped how he framed the research itself, including the regulatory and external factors that influence housing prices beyond efficiency ratings alone.
The analytical foundation beneath all of this is competitive-level mathematics. Owen earned a silver medal in the UK Maclaurin Olympiad, and has achieved a distinction in the British Mathematical Olympiad round of the Senior Maths Challenge three years running.
Building EconSim
Where the research paper tests theory, EconSim makes it usable. The app, currently in a working beta and weeks from launch, places GCSE and A-Level students inside interactive economic simulations rather than in front of another set of revision notes. A student selects their syllabus and modules, builds an economy around them, and then makes government-style decisions while watching the consequences play out on the economy’s health bar. AI-generated feedback, drawn from exam mark schemes, explains why each choice moved the numbers the way it did.
The design decisions come directly from Owen’s economics studies. Behavioral economics motivated the project, and concepts like nudge theory and game theory shaped how the app keeps students engaged while teaching them accurately. With development nearly complete, he has shifted into the launch phase, producing promotional content and building early traction ahead of a freemium release.
The Hardest Part Is Starting
Ask Owen what running has taught him about long projects, and his answer is unexpectedly specific. The hardest part of a race, he says, is not the race itself. It is getting started. The same is true of building an app, where the sheer number of possible directions can produce analysis paralysis. His most productive days, he has found, are the ones where he simply decides to begin.
That habit runs through everything else on his profile, including a musical life he treats with the same seriousness: a Distinction in the ARSM saxophone diploma, first saxophone in his school’s Big Band, and membership in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, which he entered through audition at grade 8 standard.
Owen intends to study economics at university, with an interest in urban economics and data analysis. Whatever comes next, the pattern is already established. He picks a distant finish line, trains consistently, and trusts the result will arrive when the work is done. It is how a school reaches nationals for the first time. It is also how a research paper gets written and an app gets shipped.
