Reflections on Oxford: Conclusion.

               

I can and will never forget my time at Oxford. It was full of great times with friends, time spent learning from the best, time spent throwing myself into what I love, wonderful opportunities, inspirational people, time spent trying to achieve change for the better… But far too often my time at Oxford was eclipsed by feeling I wasn’t welcome, that things were far too stressful, and that my friends were being unfairly treated by the system.

                I look forward to the day when change will truly come to Oxford. But currently it seems still very far off.

                That’s why I wrote this post. I want Oxford to change. And I want people to know how much it needs change, and the change that it needs.

                That’s why I went back to my old school to speak to students about Oxford: I want to see people who have lived in the real world at Oxford. For only then will Oxford start to resemble the humanity of the real world. 

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Reflections on Oxford Series Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.

I know so many people that have rusticated from Oxford. Some of them started out with me and are now a year or two behind me. Some of them would have graduated before meeting me if not for having had to rusticate.

By the time I got to second year, I was truly shocked by the amount of rustications I was seeing. I really just didn’t think it was healthy, or normal, that a university should have such a high concentration of its students intermitting their degrees because of mental health issues, typically depression and anxiety.

What is it about Oxford that makes it so prone to making people like this? Why is it that people that have soared seamlessly through the education system suddenly reach breaking point when they come to Oxford?

It is worrying to me, honestly. In fact, it is a big part of the reason that I knew I had to write this post.

Before I started at Oxford, an acquaintance from back home said to me, “Oxford has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country.” Not the most comforting thing to hear, to be honest – and I assured myself I wouldn’t let it get to me that much, but the reality is, Oxford has been known to and does break people that much.

A few weeks ago, I found out the real cause of death of someone who had been studying at my college. I had sung with my college choir at his memorial service, and I had always wondered sadly how it had come to be that a 23-year old with so much potential had just “died suddenly”, with seemingly no explanation.

I guess it must have been because an enquiry and inquest was still ongoing at the time that the truth was not disclosed to us, but it turned out that the highly gifted PhD student had committed suicide. By jumping in front of train.

Because it had simply become too much for him.

It may seem hard for others to believe or understand how you can get to this point, but honestly, having experienced the kind of pressure that I can imagine this guy was under, I can comprehend it.

The number of suicides that Oxford University has witnessed, in the last forty years alone, is scary. In my second year, two students committed suicide within three months of each other.

In many cases, rustication may help save a life.

Support and Rustication

                But is it always the best course of action?

                Believe it or not, I considered rusticating in those last two months of my degree. I’m glad I didn’t, though, especially in view of some of the horror stories I’ve heard!

                As I said, rustication is a common occurrence on university grounds. I’d say most people know someone who has rusticated. I knew many. Some of them were my close friends.

                In fact, in my first year one of my tutors suggested that I consider rusticating – not because of mental health concerns, but because I had recently been diagnosed with a muscular chronic pain condition which was making my life difficult. (That’s a story for another day.) I was adamant that I didn’t want to – I didn’t want to delay the course of my life, I just wanted to get through my degree in the normal time-frame.

                Come the stress of finals, I was prepared to make that sacrifice to get myself well again, but having been made aware of some things since then, I can’t be completely sure that it would have been better for my mental health and general wellbeing to take a year out.

                There are a lot of things wrong with rustication.

One thing I noticed quite early on in my degree is that rustication seemed to be pressed on people with almost no alternative. You’re struggling with depression?, it seemed to be, OK, just go away for a year and come back better.

Does that always work though, really?

If you’re going to tell someone to go away for a year so that they can manage their depression or anxiety, what are you going to do to ensure that they don’t simply come back twelve months later in exactly the same state – or worse?

Oxford seems to be notoriously bad at this. I can think of at least four people I know who have rusticated twice because of depression.

I think it’s safe to say, rustication wasn’t the cure for them.

In the past, rustication was seen as a punishment. It was complete suspension from one’s studies for a year. In that time, students could not come back to their colleges, not even to go the library or socialise with friends.

You’d think things would have changed, right?

Not so. Even though you are still enrolled on your course, you are not allowed to enter college grounds – so those books you might have been planning to get from the library so you could study in a less stressful environment? You can’t get them.

Get this: at some colleges you are seen as so much of an emblem of shame that when you rusticate, you have to leave through the back gate. You can’t even take all of your things in one go. They have to be sent to you. I have read stories of students who were effectively forced out of college against their will because the college decided it was in their best interest to leave. As in, they found out the day before, You’re leaving, bye. Read more here.

How is that supposed to make anyone already struggling with mental health feel any better?

                I’ve read about and seen first-hand people who have been pushed out of college because they’re told they’re disrupting other people’s studies. One of my friends with a medically-certified physical condition was told by the Senior Tutor that she was “making it all up” and that it was “all in [her] head”. How would that make you feel? She was told that in me, as her friend, willingly helping her out and looking out for her, she was distracting me from my studies. I was infuriated.

                Some colleges have amazing staff that truly care for the welfare of their students. The welfare officer at my college is brilliant – so brilliant that the whole JCR voted to get her a special present to thank her for all she does/did for us! Others don’t. And sometimes there’s a mix of staff that care and staff that really don’t care.

                At some colleges, believe it or not, they have – or had until very recently – photos in the porters’ lodge of all their rusticated students. It was like an FBI most wanted list. If you had the face of one of those people on the wall, you were not welcome on college premises. Come on, is being ill a crime??

                Lots of people come back in a worse state after rustication. They have felt completely isolated during their year away, by virtue of the way they have been treated by their colleges, and are now in a new academic year where they have to make new friends. One girl talked about how, during her year away and afterwards, she had to deal more with the trauma of rusticating than actually dealing with why she’d been rusticated in the first place.

Oxford is not good at dealing with mental health. Because if it were, things like this wouldn’t be happening.

But these initiatives simply aren’t enough if the colleges, who have the most power, continue to be led and handled by people who couldn’t care less.

We also need to question what it is about the Oxford environment that takes people to this unhappy place so frequently. Rather than simply supplying support for cases of inevitable depression and anxiety, Oxford could deal with the root causes of their depression and anxiety.

For many, a real sense of unhappiness and isolation comes from being made to feel unwelcome. Unwelcome because of their cultural background, unwelcome because of the colour of their skin, unwelcome because of the way they speak, unwelcome because of their gender, unwelcome because they have a physical condition that limits them, unwelcome because they are struggling with mental health… This sense of isolation that so many feel has a lot to do with the university’s failure to truly expand into all echelons of society. If Oxford didn’t look so homogenous, those that don’t quite fit the general mould wouldn’t feel so disenfranchised. Though the university prides itself on saying that it offers lots of bursaries and has a great access programme, the things that I’ve mentioned above that make it so emblematic of elitism do put many people that are cut off from this privilege feel marginalised.

             We also have to consider how Oxford’s toxic pressure-cooker environment can take people to breaking point. The terms last only 8 weeks, yet in that time the average Oxford student does more work than some people might do in two 12-week terms. The intensity of an Oxford term even means people regularly talk about “5^th and 6^th week blues”. It’s talked about as though it’s a given that during an Oxford term you will get unhappy, extremely drained and fed up. It is not normal that unhappiness and stress should be so much a part and parcel of your degree – at least, almost nowhere else.

 I talked about the amount of work that we had to do with my fellow linguist friends after our finals and we realised that out of all the books we had to study for our Final Honours School, we could only be examined on about a third of them. So why did we have to study that much? Some say, for the pursuit of knowledge. Look, it’s great to learn, but when it means that the amount that you are learning consistently makes people feel overwhelmed and not only unable to continue with their studies, but with their lives, I think we should start to re-examine how high on the priority ladder we are placing “the pursuit of knowledge”.

Change really needs to come to Oxford, and fast. We can’t afford to have more lives lost or afflicted in this way.

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Reflections on Oxford: Conclusion.

Reflections on Oxford Series Part 7: Finals.

                          Strong men tremble when they hear it / They’ve got cause enough to fear it!

                - Bill Sikes, My Name, Oliver!

Finals. I had heard enough about them in the three years before I had to do them, and seen people crumbling under the pressure they brought. I took comfort in the fact that I could do three-quarters of my degree without having to engage with them. I waived them at every opportunity between 2013 and October 2016. And then finals came knocking at my doorstep.

And Ruth Akinradewo turned into a different person.

Never have I ever experienced so much pressure and stress, and I have promised to NEVER again do that to myself. For my sake as well as the sake of the people around me who know and love me.

I’ve poked fun at it, but honestly, stress in Oxford is not a joke. And finals – the final examinations in which all the skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated in the years of your degree to date are really put to the test – take that stress level to an all-time high.

I got to repeating a mantra to myself in my final year as the pressure in the pressure-cooker got to an unbearable degree: Oxford, you did not bring me into this world and you will not take me out.

I posted it as a Facebook status on a day I was particularly feeling the pressure, and I think it made a lot of people laugh – and honestly when I had come up with that declaration it had been in part jest, but as things got more and more intense it really became less and less of a joke and a real, simple way of talking sense into myself when I felt like I was losing my senses.

I’m a Christian and so I believe that Jesus has the answer to all of my struggles and in Him lies the solution to allay all my fears. Yet I knew that I was going to need to be reminded of this a LOT more than usual to get through finals in one piece. Consequently, I had posters all over my wall with some of the key verses to remind me of God’s peace. And I STILL fell apart.

It seemed ridiculous, really. So many times I had to talk to myself and say, “Ruth, look, you’ve been through this and this and this, are you really going to let Oxford break you?” No matter how hard it could be, Oxford did not give me life and so it wasn’t going to take it from me. My life wasn’t going to fall apart because of Oxford. It really wasn’t that deep.

That’s what the theory was. In practice, it was pretty hard to exercise calmness and faith and all that good stuff.

I had fourteen exams. Fourteen.

Four in the first week of final term, and ten more over a two-week period in the fifth and sixth week of term. On top of that, in the previous term I submitted two near-8,000 word dissertation-like projects – on the same day. It’s not hard to see why the pressure got to me and got the better of me.

You speak to any Oxford graduate about finals and they will tell you they were intense.

Pressure and stress took different forms for different people. In my case, it made me withdrawn, pretty low, indecisive, anxious, an insomniac, unable to see the bigger picture, work-obsessed. I use the expression “I nearly killed myself” in more than one sense.

As someone that is usually upbeat, cheerful and a laughoholic, this version of myself couldn’t really be more different to my real self. For some time I hid myself away because I felt like I was supposed to have it all together. As the Christian, wasn’t I supposed to be showing everyone else how to do finals whilst balancing green tea on my head, living in a haze of peaceful serenity whilst everyone else was tearing their hair out? (I may do a post about struggling with depression as a Christian another time.)

I don’t think the stress of finals being the straw that broke the camel’s back was about me not being Christian enough. I think it revealed the tension at play between being human and doing Oxford finals.

This just wasn’t normal. I was someone who had gone through 10 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels and the AQA Baccalaureate, and numerous music and drama exams. I had done Prelims in my first year as well. Coping with exam stress and pressure wasn’t new to me. But I had never reacted like this.

After handing in my two big projects, I took one day off and then threw myself into revision for my finals. I was two weeks into the Easter break but I decided to stay in Oxford to revise to optimum level.

Those 2 big projects - done!

The first two weeks went really well. I enjoyed re-reading the books I’d enjoyed in my second year, getting to read them without the thought of having to write an essay on them imminently.

Then I don’t know what happened. Well, actually I do. I started suffering from a serious case of anxiety.

            There were too many books! How was I going to get through all of these works of literature in the six weeks I had left? And know the quotes by heart, the themes at the flick of a light switch? And Dante, DANTE...

Dante = Italy’s answer to Shakespeare.

My my, another reason doing Italian added to my struggles.

Dante Alighieri, frankly a brilliant poet, should rightly be studied, I’m not disputing that. His Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) is an awe-inspiring work made up of three volumes: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, documenting his vision of realms of the afterlife.

But do I regret that we had to study three 700-page volumes of medieval Italian? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. When I picked the module that celebrated the greatest of Italy’s writers, I thought about how I would be studying some of the most influential literature in Europe, and at that, literature that celebrated God and Heaven. Plus to be honest, it was clear that all the Italian tutors wanted you to pick it.

Did I think about how I was going to have to revise all of it? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to translate medieval Italian in my exam? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to learn line-by-line verses of ancient Italian? No.

My mum thinks it was Dante that really submerged me in panic. Maybe so: there’s no doubt that having three volumes of 700+ page works in medieval Italian was not exactly a recipe for tranquillity.

BUT… There are people that never had to read Dante that can relate to my experience of anxiety.

After two weeks of my revision going well, I became unable to sleep. It’s true that I have struggled with sleep disturbance in the past, but this was quite different. Night after night, I would get no more than 2 hours’ sleep – not because I had gone to bed at 4am, but because I was lying in bed consumed by stress about work and exams and my mind simply would not go to sleep.

The sleeplessness was probably the biggest battle during finals. I was already waking up at 6:30 to start work latest by 8am, and ending my working day at 10pm. I was working all day. To be honest, I quite relished the idea of sleep as a way to get away from the constant slog of work. And now even that was being taken away from me?

And of course, when you don’t sleep well, you don’t work well. I found myself falling asleep at my desk during the day because I was tired. Then I would feel I had to do more work because falling asleep wasn’t factored into my schedule!

                I more or less stopped having fun because of my finals. I stepped back a little from choir, I stopped going to my church’s weekly student nights and just went to church on Sundays, I completely stopped athletics in my final year… I’m not saying that it wasn’t sensible to scale back some of my activities to give myself more time to revise, and make sure I wasn’t spreading myself thinly between too much but rather giving more to what I could manage at a particular time, but the sense of wanting to do well meant I really couldn’t see further than my finals. My wellbeing was suffering.

                The irony is, all the wanting to do well and worrying about not doing well enough, was stopping me from doing well! Worry and anxiety of this nature consumes you and actually massively destabilises and even paralyses you. As a result, I would sit in the library from 8-10am staring at my books and my notes and not making any sense of them, or barely writing three sentences on my spreadsheet.

                The change in me was so apparent to my mum, my friends, my pastors and my tutors that they stepped in in full force to do whatever they could to help. I really couldn’t have gotten through it without them. I got on my own nerves with the state I was in, so I don’t know how they managed to deal with me as kindly and understandingly as they did.

I wasn’t planning to go home until Easter weekend, but my mum got me to come home THREE times in the week before then because I really needed some help. I was being so irrational. I remember when I got home, saying to my mum and one of my friends over and over again, “I’m gonna fail. I’m gonna fail.” The reality is, that was completely untrue – despite how badly my revision was going, my results in mock exams a couple of weeks later were still far from fails.

My experience is not that different to a lot of finalists.

We all knew how awful finals were and mutual support and encouragement came through then like no other time. Every time you met a fellow finalist, you would boost each other by saying: “You can do it, I believe in you! We can do this!” (Because of course you had to encourage yourself as well.) One of my friends and I, having a particularly rough day in the library, joked that we could make a mixtape of the amount of times we’d sighed! Every time the other sighed and put her head on the table in total despair, the other would say “Are you OK?” and then after lamenting together for a few minutes, we’d pick up our pens and start working again. You saw the best of humanity and people coming together during finals, honestly. We were all carrying the horrible burden together.

               Every single one of my friends, from what I can remember, turned into a different person over finals. Many of us struggled with insomnia and had to get prescribed sleeping tablets during exam season in order to be able to rest. Even with my sleeping tablets, I was sleepy in more than a few of my exams.

Angst, irritability, depression, indecisiveness, frustration, panic… I mean, it was different for each person but generally finals weren’t the happiest times of our lives.

See how happy I was post-exams??!

Oxford finals can actually get so unbearable that year in, year out, a large number of people decide to rusticate. Actually, this doesn’t just happen before finals, but can happen at any point during one’s degree. Rustication is when a student takes a year out of their degree for health reasons. It can be because of physical health, but more and more frequently now it is linked to mental health. I heard twelve lawyers in my final year rusticated in the two weeks before their nine exams, because it was just getting to be too much. 

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Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.

Oxford Series Part 6: The Work.

THE WORK.

                Ah, you didn’t think I would forget to tell you about this, did you?

                One simply cannot talk about Oxford without talking about THE WORK.

                I actually really enjoyed my degree. I love languages, and I chose the right subject for me. I loved studying something that I was passionate about, and to which there was a limitless scope of knowledge. I could never know or understand everything about French or Italian grammar, but I could keep learning more about them both with each day and expanding my vocabulary of, and familiarity with, the two languages.

                Does that mean I didn’t have moments of frustration, stress and “Why did I choose this degree?!” Absolutely not.

Course Content

                My biggest and most recurrent frustration and regret with my degree was that I chose to do French and BEGINNER’S Italian. I nearly dropped Italian MANY times in my head. By the third day of the week-long pre-sessional course that we ab initio Italian students had before starting our degrees officially, I was in tears and telling my tutor that I wanted to drop Italian. In my by then eleven years of studying French, we had never even had to learn how to conjugate the past historic tense because it is rarely used, and typically in very formal written registers. But three days in, when I didn’t even properly know colours in Italian, we were learning the passato remoto! It seemed I had bitten off more than I could chew.

                It is a testament to the endless encouragement of my Italian tutor and my mum that I kept going with Italian. I had MANY days in the first year of my course of being given back translations into Italian that I had toiled over for pretty much entire days, with markings and corrections EVERYWHERE. Amazingly, by the end of my second year I was getting firsts in some of these same tasks. Miracles do happen.

                I enjoyed the fact that I could choose what interested me the most within my subject. I loved translation and postcolonial literature, and I got to specialise in both of these areas in my final year.

                I only have a few criticisms of course content in my languages degree. We could have had more speaking practice. In our first year, we had almost no time devoted to oral practice of our languages. As a result I lost a lot of the confidence I had developed speaking in French at school. (I couldn’t speak Italian yet so that doesn’t count, LOL.) I would go so far as to say I spoke better French during my A Levels than I did in the first couple of years of my degree. It took my year abroad to give me back my confidence.

                Another thing I would have to say is that the curriculum was skewed in one clear direction throughout. Most of what we studied was written by old, white men. Nothing against that social group, but I don’t think they are the only group worth studying. And that was the impression you might get doing not just a language, but probably any, degree in Oxford. The first-year course is mandatorily the same for everyone, and for us Frenchies there was only one woman writer. They’ve since changed the course but sadly, even though they changed the work to be studied, there is only one female writer. Why is it that writing by females is marginalised to the point that two completely different writers have to be substituted for one another, because they cannot co-exist on the same course?

                We also didn’t study much from writers of colour. In our first year (for French), we studied a piece of postcolonial literature from a Martinican writer. In Italian, you could easily go through your whole degree only studying literature from white writers. Because I am interested in postcolonial literature and the relationship that European nations have with their former colonies, I asked to study two writers of mixed Italian-Ethiopian and Italian-Somali heritage. Not many people even know that Italy had colonies, because it’s not talked about. No colonisers treated their colonies well, but Italy was particularly terrible. My tutor was impressed that I had made the effort to study something different to what people usually picked, and he said after thinking about it, he was seriously going to consider putting postcolonial literature on the course.

                I’m glad. The course was too monolithic for my liking. 

Stress

                I never used to get as stressed about work as I began to be once I started at Oxford. I think a lot of it boils down to the feeling, “I’ve gotten into Oxford. That means I’m meant to be among the best in the world at what I do. I need to prove myself worthy of getting here.”

                I have a vivid memory of working on my first official assignment once I started my degree. It got me all into a fluster. I started shaking and more or less having a panic attack. Now, this was out of character for me. The particular task I had been given I had never had to do before and I just wasn’t sure I was going about it the right way. I have no doubt that the reason I got so fretful over it was that I felt I was supposed to know what I was doing: You’re in Oxford, aren’t you, Ruth? You should be able to do this.

                I ended up emailing my French tutor with my concerns, and was quickly assured that I was going about it in the right way. When I got my results, it was clear I had nothing to worry about.

                But knowing we’re capable doesn’t stop us from worrying and stressing over things, and just plain old feeling the pressure.

                Every Oxford student knows a little something about stress.

                Many Oxford degrees revolve around LOTS of reading, and LOTS of essays.

                My degree, this is true – even ask the medics and lawyers! – is widely regarded as one of the hardest degrees to do in Oxford. A languages degree is not easy anywhere, of course… But in Oxford… I kid you not, I assembled the total number of books I had studied for my final honours school – meaning the second and fourth year of my course and not including the first year – and it totalled a whopping FIFTY-FOUR!!! That’s fifty-four books in a foreign language, not to talk of all of the critical reading that we would have to do. And of course, reading in a language that is not your native tongue takes longer – you have to check words up in the dictionary and sometimes re-read things because you don’t understand the syntax, etc...

All 54 of the books that I studied in my second and fourth years for my FHS. (!!!)

                In our first year we would study one book in each language every two weeks, and write an essay on some aspect of it for a tutorial.

                In our second and fourth years we would have to read about three books for one essay. And noo, these were not small 100-pg novels. Sometimes they could be up to 600 pages. 

                It’s not hard to see why the term ‘essay crisis’ is widely-used in Oxford. You don’t even have to explain what that means to anyone, they totally get it, because the likelihood is, they’ve been there before.

essay crisis: n. Oxford University

a term used to describe the overwhelming stress of having to get one’s essay done for a tutorial in a few hours.

An essay crisis usually consists of the following:

1. Knowing you need to get your essay done and emailed to your tutor that evening, and in the morning you haven’t even finished the books yet. Because, don’t forget, even if you know what’s happens in the book, you still have to have fish out for relevant quotes from the experts, and to do that, you have to read the critical works and journals as well!
2. Waking up at ridiculous o’clock to try and get your essay done in time. For me this sometimes meant just not going to sleep the night before, which was stupid, but sometimes I didn’t really have a choice. (FYI, I wasn’t a procrastinator, I just tried to do everything and sometimes forgot that I’m A HUMAN BEING and can’t go to every fun evening event for every society I’m part of and still get all my work done.)
3. Removing yourself from all society and typing in front of your computer in a frenzy all day. Usually for me, this was in my room, as I tended to work better there, but many essay crises occur on a daily basis in libraries across Oxford.
4. Potentially working through the night. Oh, the days when I stayed in the library till 3am as late evening turned to black night, everyone left the library and I was the sole person there working on the three commentaries our tutor had set us for ONE tutorial! (That was one crazy term.) – Depressing.
   
   
5. Eating lots of crackers and crisps because you don’t have time to cook.
   
   
6. Not even having your shower and getting dressed until the work is done. Actually, I have one friend who was known for just not showering at all and going straight to his tutorial after having finished it a few minutes before!
7. Checking your word count every 15 minutes to see how close you are to the 1,500-word minimum.
8. Managing to write 2-and-a-half pages in a little over 2 hours or less, when somehow if you had more time you might be working on the same essay for a day and a half.
   
   
9. All culminates in the joy of finishing the essay. Like no other. Usually gives way to, “Ah, I’m free! Now I can go to sleep.”

Sure, then, you could go to sleep, but you knew you couldn’t for long because – hey, there was still more to do! As well as at least one tutorial a week – and sometimes I did have two tutorials in one week because of weird arrangements, so potentially two essay crises in one week – not fun… I would have to do a piece of Italian prose (translation into Italian from English) every week, French prose every other week, a translation from Italian into English every other week, and a translation from French to English also once a fortnight. Then an essay in Italian once a fortnight and the same for an essay in French – plus learning lots of vocab, practising inexplicable grammar, preparing specific things for speaking classes… Plus of course you had to go to the lectures, actual classes, tutorials and read your books.

No doubt though, pretty much everyone I know has sat in a tutorial talking about a book they haven’t completely finished. Oh yeah, it totally happened to me. Try as you may, getting through the equivalent of 3600 pages of foreign language text in two weeks is hard for anyone. Basically, you quickly learnt the skill of knowing how to talk about your books in an intelligent way with very little knowledge. Getting an overview of the general plot of the book and getting to grip with its main themes usually sketched out the outline of the essay for you, and you could throw in a few relevant quotes from the bits you actually had read to bolster your ideas.

Do you know what one of the most exciting prospects for me was as I prepared to go on my year abroad? Not just, oh, I’ll get to live in sunny places and experience other cultures and speak their languages – but oh my gosh, I’ll finally have the time to read all these books!!

Ha. I was wrong: I worked full-time on my year abroad so I actually didn’t get as much time as I had imagined, studying in depth all the books I’d had to race through over the past year and getting through the ones I was to study in my final year. However I know I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. In fact, I have friends that finished their degrees a year ago that are now relishing properly reading all the books they only managed to skim over during their Oxford degrees.

I do think it’s sad that the amount of work takes us to that point: where you actually can’t fully enjoy what enthralls you about your degree because you have to rush to get the next essay done. I mean, I do like the fact that an Oxford degree pushes you to be the best you can be: I have friends that did degrees which only called for one essay a term, and though that would make for a much more relaxed life, I don’t feel that would really be pushing myself – and if I’m paying £9,000 a year for my degree, I’d quite like to be able to get as much teaching out of it as I can.

My mum said it as I got into the throes of finals stress in Oxford, and I concur: You can’t survive an Oxford degree unless you love what you’re doing. For an academic course to take that much out of you and for you to keep going, you must have a real in-your-bones passion for it. Because most guys or girls would break up with a human being that put them through as much stress as an Oxford degree.

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Part 7: Finals.

Part 5: Sub Fusc and Other Weird Oxford Traditions from the Medieval Times

Oxford is a strange place.

                It is not at all out of the ordinary to see monks walking around Oxford. Catholic monks dressed in long white robes and sandals. First time I saw it I did a double take, like Did I just get transported into another century? But after a while I got used to it. A neighbouring student building, St. Benet’s, has a live-in monastery for Benedictine monks.

                I kid you not: one of my friends once saw a group of them SPEAKING IN LATIN to each other in the street. In Latin. In 2017. Need I say more?

                If you ever wished you lived in the medieval times, Oxford is the place for you.

Matriculation

                When you first get inducted into the University of Oxford, you go through this weird ceremony. It involves you wearing this.

Little Ruth at matriculation, taken on the terrible camera phone I had at the time

                This is not a normal outfit. What is this stupid gown that has flaps on the sleeves? If I wanted to look like an idiot, I would have said so. But at least for matriculation, you all look like idiots together, so it isn’t so bad.

                It’s quite fun for all the city residents and tourists though, to see a few hundred young people walking through the street looking like that.

                Matriculation is mandatory and from what I remember it cost about £30 or so for the complete outfit, known as sub fusc. The commoner’s gown, the mortarboard – which, incidentally, you are not allowed to wear until you graduate (stupid!), but need to carry with you at all times – and the velvet ribbon. That’s for the ladies: the men had to wear dark suits with white bow ties and the gown on top. There were also scholar’s gowns, which looked much nicer, but cost about two-thirds more, so even though I could really have gotten one as I was a choral scholar, upon being told it was more for academic scholarships, I decided I’d keep my money.

                What happened in the matriculation ceremony, you ask me?

                A lot of bowing, and many words of Latin were released into the air to deaf ears. (Because again, we’re not fluent in Latin.)

Sub Fusc

                We’ll come back to the university’s obsession with Latin later.

                Now, let’s talk about exams and how strange Oxford makes them.

                Forget about the fact that we call mock exams ‘collections’. I have some even weirder info for you. You know that weird uniform I was just telling you about which consists of us looking like bats? Well, we have to wear that for our exams.

                At any other university – for goodness’ sake, even Cambridge has ditched this odd tradition! – you go to your exams wearing whatever you want. You ought to feel relaxed in what you wear, seeing as you feel tense and angsty in every other aspect of your being, right?

                Not if you’re in Oxford. If you’re in Oxford, you have to wear your sub fusc to a tee.

                You have to wear tights with your skirt, or black socks which cover your ankles if you’re wearing trousers. Yes, even if it’s 28 degrees. And you have to wear your stupid black gown on top of your white shirt. And you can’t take it off until you get into the exam hall. So there you stand sweating. I feel especially sorry for the guys, considering they have to wear their dark suits as well!

                And thou must not forget the mortarboard, the square hat that you’re not even allowed to WEAR! Because of course, if you don’t wear it, you are not dressed in full sub fusc, according to university guidelines. Guess what, heading down to my exams, having managed to get myself relatively calm, I had to run back to my room to get my mortarboard because I didn’t want to risk not being able to sit my exam because I didn’t have a stupid hat I couldn’t wear with me. I mean, it doesn’t get much more ridiculous than that. (But once I realised, and I really couldn’t be bothered to go back, so I didn’t! Shh, don’t tell – they never noticed.)

                I’ve heard that people that are not wearing satisfactory socks have been turned back from their exams because they were deemed to have been dressed inappropriately.

                Do you know, twice in my time at Oxford – in my second year I believe, and again in fourth year, there was a vote at the OUSU Council on whether or not we should keep or get rid of sub fusc? And BOTH TIMES the majority voted to keep it. I just don’t get it. There were so many good reasons to get rid of it: improved comfort; less stress; money saved; no reinforcement of ancient elitist Oxford culture which so many people feel left out of… but it still won. I think that says a lot about who still runs Oxford.

                Oh and of course, there are the carnations.

                There is a long-standing tradition in Oxford that on your first day of a set of exams, you wear a white carnation, pinned to the lapel of your gown. Then for all consecutive exams, excluding the last one, you wear a pink carnation. And then, for glory day – the final day of exams, when your freedom arrives – you wear a red carnation. This tradition is so commonplace in Oxford that the florists sell carnations in a special pack of three with a dressmaker’s pin especially for Oxford students.

A very happy Ruth on the last day of her Prelims (first year exams)

                They say it’s not compulsory but I’ve heard that the only reason some invigilators will allow for why you don’t have your carnation on is it that you have hay fever. Seriously?? As if actually sitting your exams and knowing your stuff wasn’t stressful enough, you have to worry about whether or not you have a carnation, whether it’s the right colour, and whether or not it is alive or dead when you pin it on. And then you have to worry about keeping it on. Worries I could do without on exam day, I reckon!!

                I really didn’t care much for the carnation thing. Once I’d got my carnations, I made them last even if the petals were curling up and turning brown and the stem was starting to go mouldy. (I’d just trim off the over-moist bit.) I’d much rather spend my time revising my quotes than walking 15 minutes to the florist for something as superfluous as a carnation! Also, my carnations often fell off on the way anyway, or during the course of the day. So it really wasn’t that deep for me. It was a frequent favour people asked on the college-wide Facebook group though: Does anyone have a spare pink carnation? I have an exam in an hour and mine has died! #Oxfordproblems.

Graduation

                The most ridiculous ceremony I have ever been part of. It was streamed online so some of my friends got to watch, and they were completely confounded.

                The introduction was in English. It was the only part spoken in a language I understood. The rest was in Latin.

                The proctor defended this for most of his speech, saying that “some people” might find it strange that the ceremony is conducted in Latin, but this is how it was done in the 1000s and so this is how we continue to do it. Alright then mate, if we had that approach to all of life we would still be doing a lot of terrible things because “that was how it was done back in the day”… Oh wait, Oxford already has that approach to everything.

                I have friends that studied Classics (Ancient Latin and Greek) that didn’t even understand all of the ceremony. So what hope did I have?

Luckily, our families in the audience had translations in the programmes they were carrying. We didn’t. So we sat through our own graduation ceremonies barely comprehending a word.

                Though there were some things we understood. When the proctor read out Engineeringaria and Computeria or some such invented word to denote subjects that obviously didn’t exist in the time of the Roman Empire, my friends and I couldn’t help ourselves. We burst out laughing. The absurdity was just hilarious.

                At several points in the ceremony, two proctors walked the length of the hall, to the door and back, holding their sceptres. Just because. Apparently it represents soliciting the votes of the Deans, allowing students to be admitted to their degrees. If you’ve ever seen two grown adults walking back and forth silently up and down a hall you’ll know it’s pretty hilarious. You could see a mix of embarrassment and amusement on their own faces.

                There was also a frightening recurrence of people taking off their soft caps or mortarboards (only certain people are even allowed to wear their mortarboards inside – not the common graduates of course!) before anything could happen. The three Proctors, sitting on their thrones like royalty, would do this about three times. It was ridiculous.

                You know how at a normal university, your name is called out and you go up and get your certificate from someone and shake their hand? We don’t do that. We actually get our certificates sent to us in the post a month later, and instead of going up separately, we go up in a massive group. One of the people in this group has to hold hands with the Dean. (Yes, really. Thank God it wasn’t me.) And then comes the bowing.

The bowing. I’ve watched the video my Uncle made of me walking up and it turns out we bowed EIGHT TIMES. The Proctors watch you all bow to them, three consecutively, and then stand, and bow again, and again, and again… I felt like I was part of a pantomime. I was on the front row and I really couldn’t stop myself from smirking.

And of course after you hear a long paragraph of Latin you don’t understand, you have to respond with ‘Do fidem’ (apparently it means I swear) – yet you don’t even understand what you’re swearing to.

                After that you leave as everyone claps for you, and you come back with your fur hood attached to your graduation gown. This means you have officially been conferred with your degree from the university.

                Once the ceremony’s over, you stand outside and have to keep donning your mortarboard to all the university officials as they leave the premises.

                The whole thing was just a complete joke. But the graduation gown did look nice.

With the living legend that is my mum.

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Part 6: The Work.

Part 4: Student Life in Oxford

                You may think – I did too – that students would be well-behaved at Oxford. That the “crazy” bug that most students seem to catch just wasn’t in the Oxford air. Not so.

                People getting so drunk that they get their rooms mixed up with the floor above and attempt to walk into other people’s rooms at 3am? Happens in Oxford. People doing weird initiations which involve them attempting to carry cookers into their peers’ rooms at 4am? Happens in Oxford. People leaving their food in the fridge for over 6 weeks so it develops three layers of mould in 5 different colours? Happens in Oxford. Students leaving the kitchen in such a state that you want a bulldozer to knock out all the grime so you don’t have to touch it for yourself? Happens in Oxford.

                Students are weird.

                I have the same types of stories that most students that lived in halls of residence have. (And yes, all of the above really happened.) People stealing my stuff from the fridge? Tick. The worst time was when a friend had bought me a brand new bottle of milk when he went out for his own stuff and by the following morning someone had drunk half of the bottle. But I have friends for whom it was actually quite a big problem – people would steal their food so often that it got to the point where my friends were actually going to be out of pocket because of the unidentified thief. I don’t get that kind of selfishness. If you need some food, just ask! Most people are kind  enough to share. But to take and just keep taking without asking – when you know that none of us students are rich? That’s just rude.

                We got into the habit of labelling our food to deter the thieves. And I would generally keep as much food as I could in my room to make it impossible. And after a while, my pots and pans too because those started to go missing as well.

                I was pretty naïve before I started university. I mean, I didn’t live in a bubble, but… I don’t drink, I don’t believe in sex before marriage and I don’t go clubbing – so a lot of stuff that your typical student would get involved in I didn’t do.

                You could say I had a bit of a wake-up call at uni.

                Halfway through your Oxford degree, you have this thing called “Halfway Hall” to celebrate having made it – you guessed it, halfway through your degree! We did the usual Oxford formal thing of having a sit-down meal with three courses and then… the sconces came.

                I didn’t know what sconces were before that and I made sure I never was present when they were done again! #SCARREDFORLIFE.

                Sconcing is this weird Oxford tradition which involves people standing up and saying: “I sconce anyone who…” It usually happens at crew dates, which I had purposely avoided to date, but it weaved its way into the end of Halfway Hall. (Disclaimer: all the tutors had left by the time this happened.) You can imagine my horror as people stood up saying things like: “I sconce anyone who has ever had sex in the shower” and ditto in the LIBRARY, and my friends stood up, including those sitting opposite and next to me. It took a while for me to be able to look at them again in the eye.

                In short, strange student behaviour happens in Oxford too. Just at other unis I might not have ever found out. Or at least, not quite in the same way.

The Oxford Vocabulary 

                I’ve already said it but I’ll say it again: Oxford is weird.

                It is such a weird place that it has its own dictionary. As in, we use words that no-one else in the English language uses.  Or at least not in that way.

                What does “scout” mean in everyday English? A young boy or girl who is a member of the movement founded by Lord Baden-Powell. In Oxford English, it means “cleaner”.

                Some of my friends really quite disliked it that we had scouts. They would come to your room every weekday morning to collect your rubbish and would clean the kitchens and vacuum the floors. As well as clean your room once a week. One of my friends pointed out that having someone do things like this for you meant that you weren’t learning any sense of independent responsibility for taking care of your own mess.

                That is true to some extent, I think. However, the scouts being there doesn’t prevent you from keeping tidy autonomously, it simply makes it easier to do. Everyone knows the work we get is so much, often we barely have time to sleep – so keeping completely on top of cleanliness single-handedly would probably be a hard job. That said, some people really did take advantage of the scouts. We would often have the same sign above the grimy message in the kitchen for days on end: ‘Please clear away and wash your dishes. The scouts are not responsible for your dirty dishes. If these items are not removed by this Friday we will throw them away.’ Come the following Monday, Tuesday or even later and there they would still be, untouched by whoever made them such a mess in the first place. It was just so disrespectful, and also unfair to everyone else who had to use the kitchen. That’s part of the arrogance that I was talking about earlier. Though I don’t doubt that similar things happen at other universities too.

                ‘Porters’ and ‘lodge’ are a few more useful words which you frequently hear in the Oxford vocabulary. Porters are the people who look after the college entrance (the lodge), and are effectively our security guards. They also handle our post and answer a lot of our queries. The porters at Somerville are some of the friendliest human beings you will ever meet; I would regularly stop by just to have a chat with them! I miss them already.

Trashing

Another useful word to know within the Oxford dictionary is ‘trashing’. Finals and other exams are so intense that once you have gotten to the end of your last one, your friends come along to throw things at you in celebration. Silly string, confetti… Some spray alcohol. You’re actually not allowed to throw food, and to that end security will check your bags going in. But people still throw them once they’ve left the premises: baked beans, flour, chocolate sauce…

                I didn’t get any food thrown at me and trashing. I banned it, and my friends kindly obliged. I did get a lot of glitter in my hair though! I also got handed and crowned with a lot of silly accessories.

I actually didn’t get trashed in my first year, so getting trashed in my final year was my first experience, and I loved it! All your friends line up behind a gate to greet you. It feels like they’re part of the culmination of the joy you feel once your exams and all related stresses are over!

                Afterwards, some people would jump in the river. The very dirty River Cherwell, which is full of eggs and stink every summer because people have gotten baptised in it after being doused in food. This is something I don’t like about the trashing tradition: it does sometimes just go too far. Also I don’t think anything can live in that river with all the rotting food in it. (You can bet I didn’t jump in it.)

Balls

                If you’re studying at Oxford, you should try and get yourself to at least one ball in your time there.

                I’m not gonna lie: I did like the balls. They were an opportunity to dress up and have fun with your friends, and do stuff you don’t generally get to do in normal life. Watch and dance along to live jazz music, be part of a silent disco, and feel fancy!

                Though they were ridiculously expensive. And I mean, ridiculously expensive. Your average ball would not be cheaper than £90. The RAG ball, which happens every November, donates its funds to charity – so that you feel better about paying for. And Oxford Union balls, for members, were about £50 – so they were the cheapest, yet if you’ve already paid close to £240 for membership it makes sense that you should get your balls a bit cheaper! 

In my last Oxford ball – at the Oxford Union, of all places – the one that declared itself institutionally racist, I decided to go in traditional Nigerian dress to make a point!

The grander, bigger balls could cost up to £200. Those were the commemoration balls, celebrating the amount of time a college had been in existence – 200 years, 500 years, etc. But get this: they would be split between dining and non-dining tickets. That meant you could pay £155 for a ticket and you wouldn’t even get a proper meal!! So tell me, please, what are you paying for?!

Formals

                Formals are similar to balls in many ways. Again, you should make sure you try these out if you do go to Oxford.

                They consist of a sit-down meal of three to four courses in your college’s dining hall. I would say the food is always fancy, but I’ve been to some friend’s colleges where it really wasn’t... The standard and feel generally depends on how many formals a college typically has in a week. At Somerville we would usually have one per week, so the food would be much fancier and people would get properly dressed up. (Not in ball gowns, but in cocktail dresses and such. If you’re a guy it’s easy – just wear a suit.) At other colleges, where formals happened up to three times a week, people would just wear jeans and then throw their gown on top (I will explain the weird Oxford clothing in a bit.)

                I liked formals. They were a good chance to enjoy a nice meal and good conversation with your friends. And get away from work.

One of my last formals at Somerville with one of my very good friends in Oxford! (We were the only black people doing French by the time we finished, haha!)

                The only bit I found really weird was the weird Latin you always had at the start. You and your fellow students would be seated, and then suddenly your tutors and the College Principal would come in. As a sign of respect, you would all hush and rise to your feet. You would remain thus until at Somerville, the Principal had uttered the words: ‘Benedictus benedicat.” Which apparently means, ‘May the Blessed One give a blessing.’ (I didn’t know that before writing this, I just Googled it. We all thought it meant, something like “bless us”. Because we’re not fluent in Latin.)

                NEWS FLASH: Oxford is obsessed with Latin. No, not just Latin, the medieval times in general. I’ve never seen anything like it.

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Part 5: Sub Fusc and other Weird Oxford Traditions from the Medieval Times.

Part 3: Oxford and its Quirks (Good and Bad)

OK, so I realise so far I might have painted quite a bleak picture of Oxford life. Forgive me, but I like to be real about things. I could have told you what you might want me to hear, speaking as an alumna of what has just been voted as the best university in the world.

                As I’ve stated before, I am not by any means saying that Oxford was all bad. I’m simply being honest about my impressions and feelings about being part of its community for 4 years.

                There is no doubt that some of my fondest memories were fashioned in Oxford. I made some of the greatest friends ever in that place, many of whom I’m sure I will be friends with for life.

COLLEGE LIFE

The college communities of Oxford make it possible to get to know people on a much deeper level than you may get at other universities. Composed of over thirty colleges, Oxford allows each student access to a close-knit community of fellow students of many different subject ranges. I’ve spoken to some of my friends at other universities about this and they say that most of their friends are on their course, because they don’t really come into contact with those studying other subjects.

                Somerville was my college, and I am glad it was. It is one of the more inclusive colleges in Oxford. I never felt out of place at my college; I felt welcome. Not so at some other Oxford colleges, for example Christ Church. As well as originally being a women’s college, Somerville was committed to levelling the playing field in other arenas.

                Even though Somerville isn’t one of the richer colleges, … OK, hold up, I’m going to have explain this. Yes, Oxford University is one institution. Yet each college is different in its own way. As well as differing in the times that they were founded, having different principals presiding over them, separate accommodation and separate choirs and sports teams, Oxford colleges can also vary drastically in how much money they possess. My college is in fact owned by St. John’s College, a much larger and you guessed it, much richer college five minutes up the road.

                It’s no surprise that a college rich enough to buy another college’s land is going to have much more to offer its students. My friends at John’s could get up to £500 worth to spend on “academic-related” products. So you could get a tablet for free. Not so at Somerville!

                A student’s financial expenditure could also vary drastically depending on which college they attended. Thankfully, my college was very good at subsidising things like meals, so although we had to put down a mandatory deposit towards catered meals at the beginning of each term, we didn’t have to pay more than £75/80 each term, and if we did not use up all the money allocated, we could get our money back at the end. That wasn’t so for my friends at Pembroke, who have to pay for “formal” meals every week, regardless of whether or not they go to them. And they don’t get their money back. Plus, their food isn’t even particularly good.

                I’ve never understood why, although attending the same university, a student’s experience should differ so enormously from college to college. I don’t think it’s fair, and many would agree.

                However, the collegiate system itself does work quite well in practice. Somerville was in many ways like an extended family, where every time you walked across the quad (big grassy lawn found in every Oxford college) [Oh and yes at Somerville you can walk on the grass – a privilege you don’t get at some other colleges! Proof that we’re less stuffy.] you would bump into someone you knew and have a five-minute chat. Through living together, sharing kitchens and just everyday college life, you got to know people really well – whether they were in the same year as you or not. I liked that.

The entrance from my college,  Somerville. (That was my brother's hand, LOL.)

BUSTLING SCENE

                Oxford is not a boring place. There is ALWAYS something happening in Oxford. Whether it’s a big shot coming down to the Union, or a big sports event between Oxford and Cambridge, or the big Christian Union-organised annual carol services, there’s something for everyone. There are new societies set up pretty much every term.

               In my time in Oxford I got involved in as much as I possibly could.

                I was a member of my college choir; my college Christian Union and the university-wide Christian Union played a big part in my student life; I loved my church; I joined the athletics club; was part of the ACS (African and Caribbean Society) – admittedly more in my second year than any other year; I’ve already mentioned the Oxford Union; was heavily involved with Oxford Students for Life, the university’s pro-life society; was part of Rhodes Must Fall; was part of Somerville Music Society; Somerville Writing Group; the university’s Alliance Française; a gender equality group set up at college known as the 1920s Society; and even performed in a little play during the Cuppers competition led by the Dramatic Union in my first year!

                If anything, the problem was that there was TOO much to do. For someone with as many interests as me, the hard thing was admitting to myself that I couldn’t do everything. To this end, I did have to let some things go, but in my second year I got to have the most fun – because I had NO exams! I’m glad I got a year off exams so that I could fully enjoy university life without quite as much stress, but in retrospect, having survived finals, I wouldn’t have minded if they had been split over a couple of years instead of being spread out over a few weeks!

INTELLECTUAL DEBATE

                A lot of people that have left Oxford talk about how they miss the intellectual debate that is part of daily life there. It’s only been a few months for me so I haven’t felt it yet; besides I seem to end up having deep conversations with people wherever I go!

                But that was another of the things I liked about Oxford. Unlike some groups of people I’ve been with, where the conversation can go on for 10 minutes about what kind of foundation or nail varnish is best – boring and completely irrelevant for someone who doesn’t wear make-up! – in Oxford, our conversations would often centre on ideological viewpoints, like the key issues behind politics and faith. Conversations were never boring.

                They could get quite heated, though. See, the thing about Oxford is, a big part of the reason people got there is that they can express their views confidently. That sadly leads to a sense of entitlement and arrogance about some people when they speak. Some people want to have a discussion with you where you exchange views and listen to one another’s points of view. Others just want to shout you down without giving ear to your opinions. That did get on my nerves.

                One of the things my friends and family told me before I went to Oxford was, “Make sure you don’t turn into one of those arrogant snobs!” And I pray to God I didn’t. I actually think I would cry if someone told me that post-Oxford I have turned into an arrogant snob. Because arrogance is one of those character traits I can’t stand, and I’d hate it if that became part of who I am.

CENSORSHIP

                Now, I’m far from your typical Oxonian. As I said before, I’m a black, female, Mancunian, Christian Oxonian. Proud of each of those adjectives, but probably none more so than that last one. Christian. I didn’t choose to be born black, be born a girl, be born in Manchester, but I did choose to become a Christian. Each forms an important part of my identity, but my faith is the one that shapes me the most.

                And in Oxford I regularly felt as though I was under attack because of my faith.

                This isn’t a pity party: I’m not new to this. Christians are supposed to be persecuted; it comes as part of the package.

                I get that some people don’t believe in God. I get that some people think “organised religion” (even though that’s not what Christianity is to me) is stupid. I came to realise that the most widespread worldview in Oxford was liberal atheism. But I don’t get how placing views that are anti-religion and anti-Christianity on a pedestal is fair.

                And I saw that happening time and again in Oxford.

                I simply gave up on OUSU, Oxford University Student Union: aka the organisation which every student contributes to and which holds itself to representing the entire 22,000 student body – because I felt entirely unrepresented by it.

                Yes, as a Christian there are certain things I believe that go against the grain of wider society. I believe in the Bible, a book which hasn’t changed even though society has.

                One of the things that I believe which is shaped by my faith is that life begins at conception. I am pro-life. (I'm pro-life and I don't see why that's a problem.)

                So are a lot of other people, and not all of them are Christians or follow any faith at all.

                OUSU didn’t care about them. Debates on pro-life matters were regularly shut down in Oxford. One was with the claim that a debate over whether abortion culture was harmful to wider society would pose “security concerns, both physical and mental” to students. Twice I went to OUSU Council meetings where the opinions of pro-life people like myself were completely discounted. Although the student union claims to represent the entire student body, it already has a “pro-choice” policy. That means from the offset they are biased towards those that are in favour of abortions, and against those who are not. I don’t really see how they can in so doing, represent the entire student body.

At the first [of these OUSU Council meetings], there was a proposition on whether or not OUSU should donate £200 (which, by the way, is about a quarter of OUSU's annual budget) to finance an abortion campaign. I spoke quite impassionedly against the motion, and there were quite a few people out there on the same side as me. But of course the motion passed. After all, this is a student body that is already committed to donating £50 to Abortion Rights each year.

Again, two weeks before I was due to leave Oxford, a motion was discussed calling for the pro-life charity, LIFE, which supports women through pregnancies and helps terminally-ill patients across the country, to be banned on university grounds. Come on now, this is not an ISIS-supporting network, it is a charity that does a lot of good across the nation. But it was being touted as though it were an extremist breeding ground. One girl said that the claim that abortion is linked to post-traumatic stress, depression and ill health is COMPLETELY UNFOUNDED and that LIFE was making it all up.

                I got fed up. I got annoyed. I got frustrated. And then finally I figured, I’m leaving this place in 2 weeks anyway, I don’t have to deal with this rubbish anymore. And I walked out of the meeting.

Never have to deal with OUSU again.

That was after 4 years of it. Four years of having my beliefs constantly rubbished and hounded. Sure, I can walk out because I’m done with Oxford now, but my heart is not happy thinking of all the other Christians or people who have similar belief systems as me being hounded and silenced across the university simply because the way we see the world doesn’t fit the way they WANT us to see it.

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Part 4: Student Life in Oxford