Do You Ever Work?

So after I've shared with you marvelous tales of champagne and chocolates, rowing, museums, towers, London, and  meeting Alan Rickman, John Mayer, and Billy Joel, I bet you are all wondering about the work load here at "the best University in the world" (at least that's how an MP described Oxford at a Union Debate last night). Well I'll tell you, but bare in mind that this is just from a visiting student's perspective. The work load varies from subject to subject, person to person!

Each JYA (Junior Year Abroad) takes 2 courses for each of the 3 terms. One course is your primary, which meets for an hour once a week in what's called a tutorial, or a tute (8 times total) and the other course is your secondary, which meets 4 times throughout term. Now you many be thinking, only 12 meetings over 8 weeks, that's a lot of free time? Well let me tell you, nothing couldn't be further from the truth!

For every tutorial, you are expected to have a paper written after you complete a massive amount of reading from your reading list. The paper is normally 2000-3000 words long and the reading list is anywhere from 6 books to 32 books (all of which you have less than a week to finish). This is not including the lectures that you should also attend. Lectures are interesting in the sense that I am currently attending lectures for 3 courses that I will not be taking until later on in the year. Some students are going to lectures on courses they may not be taking until next year! There are also SO many lectures I want to attend merely out of interest! So let's recap... that's 36 papers, roughly 7-10 pages long over the course of 24 weeks. At Dickinson, the highest number of papers I wrote in one year was probably about 8 (and I think that's an overestimate)!

So what is a tutorial like? It's an hour long conversation between you and your tutor on the paper you wrote and the readings you've read. A tutorial can have anywhere from one to three students in it. My secondary tutorial is on Comparative Human Rights. It's just me in the course and I am legitimately loving every minute of it. My primary tutorial is a different story. The course, Economic Decisions in the Firm, ended up being a Math course with 11 other students. Given that linear algebra, set theory, programming, and advanced calculus probably won't help me in my future career path, I switched into Theory of Politics at the end of second week. This posed a problem when I got an email on Tuesday from my new tutor explaining how we meet at 9 am on Weds... wouldn't have been an issue if there wasn't a 14 book reading list attached and less than 24 hours to attack it! Because of my switch in tutorials, I've essentially had to write 2 papers every week (awful deadlines! I have a tutorial and a paper due Wed morning, then another paper due Friday, tutorial Monday, and repeat! also doesn't help I am slowest reader on the planet!)

Needless to say... it's a lot of work. When I am not blogging (which you know I've been slacking on a bit), I am reading, writing, or enjoying Oxford. No down time! I haven't seen a TV in months (and not just because you have to pay for a TV license here). There is just no time! But I am so grateful for it! There is never a dull moment in Oxford.