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:
- 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!
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- Eating lots of crackers and crisps because you don’t have time to cook.
- 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!
- Checking your word count every 15 minutes to see how close you are to the 1,500-word minimum.
- 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.
- 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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