Reflections
An Oxford and study abroad recap
Merry Christmas :) I recently came home from a semester abroad, so I wanted to share some details and thoughts about the whole experience. This may be mostly for my benefit.
Oxford
Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK operate on what’s known as a tutorial system. Instead of taking lectures and recitations/sections, students are assigned weekly readings and an essay prompt in their chosen “papers”. Papers are essentially courses in the student’s major that they need to take to earn their degree. Each week, students turn in their approximately 2000-word essay to their tutor prior to their tutorial. Tutorials last one hour and are mostly a discussion of the covered readings and feedback on the essay. Most students take 1–2 papers a term, and they rarely take papers outside of their major. This is because at Oxford, the undergraduate degree is a 3-year program, with an option to add an additional year to earn a Master’s for STEM majors. There are 3 terms a year, just 8 weeks each, so it’s not hard to see why students often don’t have the time to take additional classes. Interestingly enough, none of the essays students write actually count towards their final grade; instead, at the end of the year, students must complete a 3-hour long exam of multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions for every paper taken that year. Examinations last a week and a half. Some unlucky folks end up taking 6 hours' worth of exams on a single day. Thankfully, as a visiting student, I wasn’t obligated to sit in for exams, but just the essays were enough to make me question my decision to be there some days. The tutorial system truly requires an incredible amount of self-discipline; students need to plan out their readings by themselves ahead of time, and if you can’t find the information you need in the suggested titles, you need to go to a library to find more sources. Most days my schedule had one thing on it: sit in a cafe and do work.
When students apply to Oxford, they are selected for a specific major and college within the university. A “constituent college” is a little bit like a Hogwarts house in that its primary function is to serve as a social community and home base. Once you’re in, changing majors and colleges is almost impossible. I’m not sure if this is an accurate assessment, but within Oxford, it seems like most students identify themselves by college first, then by other affiliations, such as societies or sports. There is no Greek life. I applied to study at St. Catherine’s College directly, and coordinated with the visiting students director there to select my tutorials. I selected a primary tutorial of International Relations (8 essays) and a secondary of Practical Ethics (4 essays), but due to various reasons ended up writing 5 for each instead. I also did 4 essays before the start of the term in Sociology, as a part of a pre-term course. Oxford has university societies (read clubs), but they also have smaller college societies that are more chill. During the first few weeks, I went to a lot of different taster sessions (opportunities to try a club’s activities before committing) for all the different societies, but I ended up doing archery, blind wine tasting, and rowing the most seriously.
Oxford is on a whole more traditional than the average American university. Some colleges require formal dress or sometimes gowns to dinner in “hall” (think The Great Hall from Harry Potter), and most colleges hold black-tie events at least once a semester. At the same time, clubbing is a big part of university culture. The Junior Common Room (undergraduate student council) facilitated club ticket purchases throughout the entire first orientation week for freshers, and they also organize weekly “entzes” or “bops” (parties) in the common room itself. It was interesting to see how much of an organized procedure it all was.
The UK and broader Western Europe
The rain was probably the hardest part of adjusting to the UK. It rains at least once a day, almost every day, in the UK, and people just don’t seem to care at all. I would say unless it’s pouring, usually only 40–50% of people outside actually have umbrellas out. Everybody else just walks in the rain and gets drenched without a care in the world. I had always thought of rain as gloomy weather, but getting it every single day meant that I had to adjust that mindset quickly or end up miserable.
Over the course of the fall, I went to a few locations in the UK and also jumped to a few cities in nearby countries too.
Oct. 14–16: Paris. Someone once told me crime was really bad in Paris, but either I didn’t witness much of it or I was only in the nice part of town, because I generally felt pretty safe there. The weather that weekend was much nicer than expected and we ate ourselves to death. Of course, we went to all the tourist sites, but I also found this lovely antique print shop I picked up a few postcards from. It doesn’t even have a Google Maps location, but it’s somewhere around here. Paris also has some really beautiful public parks. We spent a really long time sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Oct. 23: Bath. The UK has a really quaint part of the country called Cotswolds, of which Bath is technically a part of. Bath is a tiny town whose main selling feature is the Roman baths (hence Bath). You can probably walk from end to end in 15 minutes. I had a delicious cornish pasty from The Abbey Deli, which also happens to be a filming site for Bridgerton. We spent approximately 6 hours there and saw everything.
Oct. 28–31: Belgium (Brussels, Ghent, Bruges). Brussels had really, really nice pockets and then also some really deserted and graffiti-ed pockets. Although you can still tell Brussels grew from a town into a city, it definitely has more of an industrial city vibe. Lots of sexual iconography for some reason. We took a bus tour to Bruges and Ghent one of the days and they were both more quaint-like than Brussels. However, the bus tour was very rushed and we may have spent more time on the road than in the towns. I think one day was the right amount of time to spend in Brussels.
[I actually didn’t visit London at all up until this point because I knew I would have friends and family visiting me back to back in November.]
Nov. 2: London. Had my first Dishoom experience at Covent Garden. Dishoom is pretty much the one restaurant anybody recommends when you say you’re going to London. It is probably the best food to have entered my mouth. We also went to see the opera Tosca at the London Coliseum, where I did not realize they would be singing in English until 30 seconds in. Not sure what I expected, but once I got used to it I enjoyed myself.
Nov. 9, 12–13: London. We hopped about the King’s Cross area, where we saw Platform 9 and 3/4 and went to Dishoom King’s Cross (this will not be the last time you hear this). We also went to the Strand-level famous independent bookstore Daunt Books, which happened to be near 221B Baker Street, the residence of our favorite detective Sherlock Holmes, which we shortly ventured to afterward. At some point, we saw Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace. We saw Les Mis on our last day and it was superb. I didn’t realize a musical could pull off so many set changes; my only regret is that we could have sat closer to see the artists’ expressions when they sang. We also realized that Christmas in London starts early. Almost all the busy areas of town were covered in Christmas lights.
Nov. 17, 19–20: London. Didn’t actually repeat that many locations. We went to Westminster Abbey, Parliament (Big Ben), saw but did not ride the London Eye, hit the British Museum and the National Gallery, ice skated at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, and generally walked about Soho. Ate at Dishoom Shoreditch (Dishoom count = 3). Failed to see King Charles despite him driving past us while we were walking toward Buckingham Palace.
Nov. 23, 26: London. Dishoom Shoreditch (4!). Tower of London tour with a Yeoman Warder. More Tower Bridge pictures. Nov. 26 technically started in London but was actually an insanely long bus tour to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and Bath. While it would have been a shame to have come all the way to the UK and not seen those sites, I can also confidently say that doing them all in one day wrecked us. I did have some really good mulled cider and wine at the Christmas markets in Bath, though.
[Our term ended officially on Dec. 2, so I stayed in Europe for about a week to do a last bit of travel.]
Dec. 6–10: Amsterdam (+Rotterdam). Despite it being very cold and dark at this point in the year, Amsterdam was a very nice city. [Fun fact: the houses in Amsterdam all have hooks hanging out from the top and have a slight forward slant because furniture cannot be taken up the narrow stairs. Instead, they are hoisted up using the hook at the top and pulled in through the windows. The slant is to prevent furniture from hitting the façade as they are pulled up.] Public transit still requires a travel card but is very frequent and efficient. We went to the Rijksmuseum but unfortunately did not buy tickets in time to see Van Gogh museum or Anne Frank House. It was nice to take it easy these few days: we mostly walked around and took in the sights. On one of the colder nights, we did a canal cruise to see the Amsterdam Light Festival, an annual set of light installations around Christmastime. On our last day in town, we took a day trip to Rotterdam, which is just as nice as Amsterdam but has much more of a metropolitan city feel and very modern architecture (cube houses). There weren’t as many canals and everything somehow seemed…larger. We spent an embarrassingly long amount of time playing on a large chessboard on the ground of the public library.
Thoughts about traveling and studying abroad
After traveling for an entire semester, I’ve started feeling like I don’t need to spend that long in each city I visit anymore. If the goal is only to be a tourist, most cities can be visited in 2–3 days. I used to want to visit every tourist site there was in a city, but now I’ve been realizing I should only do things I’m actually interested in. A large part of traveling for me has actually just been figuring out what I like and don’t like to do. Sadly, this means that I’ve almost conditioned myself to rush through cities to the point where they sometimes lose their appeal after a few days. If you really boil it down, a lot of cities are composed of some subset of museums, monuments, shows, good food, and nice parks. That’s not to say there isn’t more to do there, but if you’re not staying for long, it feels a little weird to want to go do other things over the “main attractions”.
I think that’s mostly a mindset thing, though. I stayed in Oxford for almost two months and still had places I wanted to go by the end of it. It was almost a little like I was trying to learn how to be a local in Oxford rather than a tourist. I mostly tried to find good restaurants to eat at with friends and cafes I could work in. I didn’t even visit Oxford’s most famous museums and colleges until the last weeks of term.
Regarding traveling as a whole, I think I tend to enjoy doing it with other people more than just by myself. Aside from solo travel being pretty expensive, I think a large part of the joy of traveling for me comes from having someone to share my experiences with. I haven’t really truly solo traveled, so I had originally wanted to go to a few places at the end of term to experience the feeling of it, but my plans happened to align with some friends and we went to Amsterdam together. I imagine that solo travel can get quite lonely, but I also bet it offers a certain degree of freedom you can’t get when traveling with others. You can change plans on a whim and go where the wind takes you. I still want to try it sometime.
About Oxford — it’s definitely a place for people who generally know what they want to do. The tutorial system doesn’t allow much freedom to explore different classes. I was fortunate to be able to select classes outside of my major back at school I wanted to take, but most visiting students were studying the same subject as they were at their home institution. On the flip side, the tutorial system really taught me more about how to think for myself. I remember being so confused in my first Sociology tutorial when my tutor asked me what reasoning I had for a certain sociological trend. I had regurgitated some basic facts from the readings, not expecting to have to do some deeper independent analysis. This was mostly due to the fact that I considered myself unqualified, but he insisted that as long as I had reasonable deduction I could hypothesize the answer to the question.
Practical Ethics was my favorite course out of the three, though. The only other philosophy class I had taken was Philosophy of Mind at Harvard in 2020, but I found ethics to be an even more engaging subject. A common criticism of philosophy is that it’s just a bunch of old white men kicking the same question around and around, without ever really coming to a conclusion, or more importantly, coming to a solution. I think I can agree with that to some extent. Most philosophical questions do not achieve consensus. Practical ethics helped to shed some of that disillusionment I myself had with philosophy. The essay prompts were mostly about making really sound arguments on certain ethical topics (think AI ethics, euthanasia, organ sales, etc.) that held water when challenged. It was fun and torturous at the same time. Even though I had no expectations to convince the world of my beliefs using one simple essay, I found the emphasis on sound deduction and reasoning encouraging because it forced me to think very long and hard about the stance I had taken and whether I could support it or not. I would find, for example, that a lot of simplistic and commonly cited ethical arguments on the aforementioned topics were too shallow or had logical fallacies that proponents could not back. I could use those fallacies to take an opposing stance, or I could look towards building a more sound argument.
Studying abroad as a visiting student is a little like summer camp. Hanging out with freshmen as a senior doesn’t always make sense and older students at the university do not always want to form relationships with people that are leaving in a few weeks. Over the course of my time there, I spent a lot of time meeting and spending time with other visiting students, but I still got to know some great Oxford students through the societies I joined. I had done a little archery prior to studying abroad, but I had never really tried blind wine tasting or rowing before. Our instructor in wine tasting told us that learning how to taste actually improves sensitivity to taste. Allegedly practicing tasting methodology allows us to improve our sense of taste. I was not very good at it even by the end.
I wasn’t very good at rowing either, and I had trouble attending a lot of practice because I was out of town so often. The sessions I did attend though made me wish I had done a more “team-like” team sport in high school, though. Tennis is great, but when you compete, you either play alone or with just one other person. Rowing is all about discipline, the ability to follow directions precisely and on time, and the faith in your coxswain to guide you well. Each boat outing was just as stressful as it was fun. Students cannot do more than 5 outings before taking a swim test, though, and after my third outing, when it seemed like I might be out on the water a lot, I was sent to go swim in a pool with hundreds of other prospective and eager young rowers. Long story short, I passed and I honestly wasn’t sure if I would. I am not very good at swimming. It was a very liberating moment for me.
I think these past few months have been full of ups and downs. Thinking back on it now, I can mostly remember the good stuff, but there were definitely some moments when I didn’t feel great about myself. I find it hard to adjust to new environments sometimes, and there were times when I felt a little burnt out. Still, for the most part, I feel that most of the not-so-shiny aspects of these past few months have been valuable in one way or the other. I’m happy that I did it.
