Questions from wyrmwood

[taimatsu]

1: When you were little, was there something you wanted to be when you grew up? If so, what was it? If not, what did you say when grown-ups asked you that question?

At about 13 I considered being a nun. I didn't tell anyone, though. I don't remember really wanting to be anything else. My dad was (and is) a company director, which is a bit of an anonymous office job (though less so for us as we had company barbeques and things and knew the people), not really something small children aspire to, and my mother stoppped teaching English before I was born and has only just gone back to it. Close family friends were a priest (Anglican), an accountant, some housewives, a social worker (but we didn't hear much about that) and assorted other things. Jobs/careers weren't something I thought about a lot. I think I said I didn't know what I wanted to be. When I was 16 and got into youth work I started saying I was interested in being a teacher or a youthworker.

2: Do you still harbour that as a secret ambition? If not, why not? If so, then what are you doing to enable you to achieve it?

No, I don't want to be a nun - I don't think that is my vocation, and I think I would be quite bad at it. Well, not so bad at it, actually - I could probably do the prayerful bits quite well, but I'm just not called to be celibate. I want to do something which helps people. I am still kind of interested in being a teacher or a youthworker, but after some terrible experiences with depression and emotional rollercoasters over the last four years, I am not sure I am strong enough emotionally to deal with other people's problems, directly and all the time. I definitely couldn't be a social worker. I'm going to get a degree and as much varied work experience as I can, and then think about it.

3: Are there any principles or beliefs worth dying for?

Erk. Instinctively, yes. It's hard to say what. There are very basic things that I think it would be worth dying for. If, for example, I were living in a totalitarian state which tried to brainwash me into believing something like 'Black people are created to serve white people' then I think 'All people are created equal' makes it into the list of 'beliefs worth dying for'. Simple, basic principles of human rights are worth dying for, if they are being denied. Right to life, liberty, happiness, education, food, shelter, community, history, and so on.

4: Someone has just offered you a holiday, all expenses paid, no strings attached. Where do you go? For how long? How will you spend your time when you're there?

Wow. I'd probably go to Japan and other Asian areas for about two months. I'd do a lot of sightseeing and shopping, and make sure I experienced Japanese culture, perhaps arranging a homestay and program of visits to historic sites and cultural centres. I'd also try to go to China and visit papercutting centres - it's a little-known art-form I love.

5: I was really intrigued by various answers to questions about education at Oxford. What qualities would a person need to really benefit from that? And does the selection procedure successfully identify people with those qualities?

(All applies to arts subjects - sciences are taught very differently) You need to be okay working on your own, with no group work provision as standard. You need to be okay with getting yourself to lectures, the subjects of which may not coincide with those of your tutorials (you may have tutes on Revelations this term, and the lectures could be held two terms from now). You have to keep up - there is no time to catch up if you fall behind for any reason. You have to be okay with the fact that if you get something wrong, it's only going to be picked up after you finished a week's worth of essay and presented it, and you haven't got time to correct it because you're onto next week's essay. You have to cope with one hour of contact time per week, full stop. You have to be the kind of person who can cram ten weeks' study and socialising into eight weeks. You should have the voice to be able to read aloud for seventeen minutes at a stretch. Knowing how to bullshit effectively is a great asset. You muct be prepared to read your tutor's book over and over, even if you ignore all the other material for the essay (the material that's actually useful) because the tutor will invariably listen for your mention of and reactions to their book. And will complain if you miss it out.

You need self-discipline, excellent health, a totally stable emotional life, supportive parents, a sense of humour, quick wits, and the abilty to absorb criticism on one area of study/expertise and apply it to a different area of study/expertise without being told how. You must be able, basically, to teach yourself a research degree.

You need to not be me.

The selection process obviously isn't perfect - it got me in. I think I have (or at least had, once) the brains for Oxford work, but I need to be able to discuss things! Not only did I not have any group work at all (save my Greek classes), but I had misread the prospectus and picked a college which only admits one or two students in my degree each year. I had no-one to talk to. The people I had to talk to couldn't discuss my subject. I had a number of emotional crises over the first couple of terms and I fell behind and could not catch up. I came out. I discovered IRC. Thank God I didn't get into alcohol or drugs, because things would have been even worse. I basically fell apart, and didn't have time to put myself back together. I mean, if you spend three days in a ball in the corner because you just discovered you had a sexuality for the first time, you didn't make it to the library, or to the last two lectures, and you have no-one to get notes from, and the books you needed have been taken out, so you have to do the entire essay in about two days, with sub-standard books, and if you're me the pressure makes you hide even more, not less, and you might end up skipping the tute because you can't face explaining you didn't get it finished. And that's how you end up on a third official warning from the Warden.

I'm going to stop, because I'm remembering the bits I don't like remembering and feeling like a failure all over again. I do have a brain, honest, it's just sometimes I don't use it effectively. Really. Am not stupid. Really.

Comments

[omentide.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Didn't mean to awaken painful stuff. Problem with these memes, I guess.

My niece has recently had very bad experiences with the selection procedure. I don't know her that well as I only see her on family occasions. She's incredibly bright. We think it was something to do with quotas (she didn't go to a state school).

I had a lot of pressure on me to try for Oxford. Mostly from school (and my mother, who had a place, but had to give it up to work for her father). But, from that school it was a total non-starter. Only a handful of my year at school got to University at all (I had a private tutor for Latin, in case I needed it as it wasn't taught in my school) and I think only one got their degree first time around. Loads of suicide attempts, some of them successful. One or two people I know came out of it well.

My niece is on a gap year now. I think I'm hoping she'll say 'screw them' and go to Durham or Edinburgh or Leeds or something.

[taimatsu]

There are some people Oxford suits. It's hard to quantify what those people have that makes it work for them. But Oxford is not a fabulous place to do a degree. It's not a wonderful university. It does have very very good academics and great libraries and other resources, but that's not the same. As I said, though, sciences are very different - compulsory labs most days, group/pair work required, etc.

I wish I had gone to Leeds, after a gap year. Your niece isn't necessarily missing out on much; there are some experiences she'd have at Oxford that she wouldn't get anywhere else, but they aren't necessarily (or even often) experiences which help one learn or contribute to getting a good solid degree.

You should talk to other people, though, because I think, for example, Krys had a very different experience of Oxford.

[imc.livejournal.com]

It certainly sounds like you got the short end of the stick there. Yes, sciences are much different, but I wonder if even on your course you'd have had a better time if you'd happened to end up at a different college with better provision for your subject. Having tutorials that don't coincide with the lectures seems awfully bad organisation on the part of the tutors concerned!

As a Mathematics and Computation undergraduate, in my first term I had five hours of tutorials (well, classes really - all 9 first-year students at the college attended) a week just for maths, and an hour of tutorial and four hours of practicals for the computing part. This, coupled with twelve lectures per week, made me rather busy. I coped, but it does mean that any problems would have been picked up fairly quickly.

(Another anecdote is that in our second (or was it third?) term, after going to a couple of lectures on topology we collectively decided that they were completely incomprehensible (partly because of the lecturer's style) and so we got our tutor to teach it to us instead, which he did and thus we were much enlightened.)

[white_hart]

It's interesting reading about your experience at Oxford; I applied and didn't get in, which I was massively upset about at the age of seventeen. Now (and with the added insight of an Oxford-educated husband) I'm really glad I wasn't accepted: I went to Warwick, got a decent degree and learnt to be a person, and while it wasn't a perfect three years, it was OK. And if I'd gone to Oxford, I'd have ended up as you describe, if I hadn't run away screaming at the first encounter with incredibly self-assured public-school people.

And not being able to do something doesn't make you a failure; it just means you can't do that thing, be it riding a bike or getting a degree from Oxford.