Transcript + vocabulary list + exercise:
[00:00:00.000] - Oliver (Host)
Welcome back to English and Beyond. As always, there is a transcript available at www.morethanalanguage.com. Today, I am alone, which is an unusual experience. César is actually on holiday with his family. In fact, I think that this might be the first time I've ever done a podcast episode entirely by myself, in English or in Spanish. In reality, of course, I'm not alone because you're here listening. But I hope that despite it just being me, you find this an interesting episode. If not, you can always just skip it and wait for next week's when César or another special guest will return. Although he's not here in person, César was very, very keen to suggest that I do a particular topic for this podcast. This episode on his strong suggestion will be about being a former student of the University of Oxford. He's wanted to get me to discuss my experiences of Oxford on our Spanish language podcast for ages, and I have to say, I've never felt very keen. I feel quite awkward discussing Oxford for various different reasons, but this feeling of discomfort is actually surprisingly common among Oxford alumni, and I think it's worth exploring why that is, in my opinion, as well as taking the opportunity to discuss and dispel certain myths about the university.
[00:01:25.910] - Oliver (Host)
César himself finds the university quite interesting, I think mainly for two reasons. Firstly, he came with me to a formal reunion dinner held in my college. It was very, very traditional, black tie, that is, in a tuxedo, with a four course feast held in the college's huge dining hall with romantic candlelight and very, very free-flowing alcohol. The college was founded many centuries ago, so some of the buildings are frankly stunning, and it can create an incredible atmosphere for these kinds of events. He says that this experience was something totally different from anything he had experienced in his own modern university, and it was truly bizarre. The second reason I think he's quite interested in Oxford is because I think he's quite shocked when my Oxford friends have a dinner by ourselves, when kind of we meet up to have a reunion dinner. I think he's surprised by how comfortable we all are when criticising each other's ideas and debating politics, et cetera, for reasons we're going to get on to later in the podcast as well.
[00:02:33.280] - Oliver (Host)
To begin, you may have heard people talking about something called Oxbridge. This is not a university in itself. The word is a blend, a mix of the names Oxford and Cambridge, the two oldest universities in the United Kingdom.
[00:02:48.200] - Oliver (Host)
Oxford is, worldwide, the second oldest university in continuous operation. It was set up in the late 11th century and formalised at the beginning of the 13th century. Cambridge was founded, I believe, when some academics at Oxford grew unhappy with various elements of the university and broke away to found a competitor. The universities are often paired together because of their very similar nature. They are collegiate, that is, formed of colleges. Their age, their similar ethos, and their recruitment agreement. When you are 18 years old and applying for university for an undergraduate degree in the UK, You can only apply to Oxford or Cambridge. The universities have a unique agreement that restricts you from applying to both in the same year for an undergraduate degree. Generally, I will be talking about Oxford in this episode purely because that is what I have experience of. I've actually barely been to Cambridge, and I don't know the city very well at all. However, everyone in the UK has an opinion about Oxford. Often, these opinions are quite critical, and I guess that's a reaction to Oxford's fame and prestige. There's an assumption that it's a very good university, and so most people don't bother to say that.
[00:04:10.270] - Oliver (Host)
Some very common opinions that people bring up about Oxford are to dismiss it simply as overrated, that its students' demographics don't reflect the class background of the country, that its student body is whiter than the rest of the country, and so on. I'm also going to discuss a few of those issues in this episode. As a teacher myself now in a secondary school, it's quite fascinating to see my students' enthusiasm about applying to Oxford. Some of them, we could say, are genuinely obsessed with going. I think I was essentially the same. As soon as I found out about Oxford, it represented the pinnacle of educational achievement for me, and I think that that is part of my problematic relationship with the university. Oxford came to symbolise completely both success and I'd attend approval from others. Throughout my secondary education, that is, until I turned 18, I dreamt of going to Oxford because I thought that that would validate my choices and my academic worth as a student. Now, I feel very differently, but it would be dishonest to pretend that I didn't care about going at the time. I wanted to go very, very deeply indeed, to be accepted by these world experts, and, most importantly, to make my parents proud.
[00:05:31.130] - Oliver (Host)
Academics were a huge part of my identity as a teenager. I was pretty impeccably well-behaved. I did all the right extracurricular activities. I worked pretty hard, and there was nothing I wanted more in life than to achieve the best possible results in my public exams and to maximise my chances of getting into Oxbridge. In hindsight, I felt quite embarrassed to say that out loud, but it really was the reality for me at that time. And my parents were unsurprisingly a big part of my attitude. Academics were unquestionably the most important part of adolescence from my parents' perspective. That is not to say that I was in any way bullied or that the pressure to succeed came from my parents. I certainly did struggle with pressure during my childhood, and I did find it hard to cope at certain points with the expectations that I felt were on me. However, these expectations were basically self-imposed. I knew that my parents wouldn't love me less if I didn't achieve top grades, but I found it really hard to believe that they wouldn't be less proud of me if I didn't get those grades and get into Oxford.
[00:06:41.410] - Oliver (Host)
Most of us have dreams about their futures at some point, and these vary throughout our lives. Some of these dreams we achieve, and others we don't. Sometimes it doesn't actually even matter very much if we miss a goal, because the progress we made during the process of trying to achieve it turns out to be as valuable as if had achieved our dream. That said, when we do achieve a long-held goal, it seems almost inevitable that it will not live up to the full extent of our dreams. Needless to say, it was impossible for Oxford to be, in reality, everything that I had hoped for. I will talk more about this later on, but in general, I think the fact that so many students dream about going to Oxford, and so many parents dream about their children going to Oxford, leads to an unsurprisingly negative cultural interest in what is really, at the end of the day, just a university. People feel judged if they don't get in. Parents can take their child's failure to receive an offer surprisingly personally. This means that people can end up feeling very negatively about the university itself and sometimes about the students that go.
[00:07:50.760] - Oliver (Host)
As I mentioned earlier, one very common negative opinion that people bring up about Oxford is simply to dismiss it as overrated and insisting we shouldn't give it Cambridge so much attention in comparison to their competitor universities. Some people, in the UK and abroad, view it, alongside Cambridge, as the epitome of elitism. Elitism is defined as the dominance of a society or system by an elite and the superior attitude or behaviour associated with an elite. There may be some truth to that. Maybe you'll have decided by the end of the episode.
[00:08:26.450] - Oliver (Host)
Partially as a result of their tough admission policies, which I will discuss shortly, Oxford and Cambridge are almost always ranked as the top universities in the UK, and generally towards the very top of the worldwide rankings. Outside of the UK, the university receives most applications from China and the USA. Unsurprisingly, though, all university rankings are highly controversial, and some of the factors that are used to rank them would be considered largely irrelevant by many people making their choice of where to go to study. The graduates of the university, therefore, have the benefit of both the great grades that they needed to get into Oxford in the first place, and then they also have the Oxford brand on their CVs when applying for jobs.
[00:09:10.790] - Oliver (Host)
CV stands for Curriculum Weetai, the Course of Life in Latin. Essentially, it's a document where you set out your achievements, your employment, and what you've learned in each job. These Oxford graduates, with these advantages, unsurprisingly, often end up in highly prominent and well-paid positions in British society, which further bolsters Oxford's fame and also its notoriety, its infamy, its ill-fame. For example, out of the 57 Prime ministers that we've had in the UK, the Prime Minister being the most important political figure in the country, equivalent to our President, 44 attended either Oxford or Cambridge, that is, almost 80%, and within that number, 30 of them went to Oxford alone. It's also unsurprising when you consider the unpopular of most politicians that Oxbridge receives quite a lot of the blame for the state of the country. With this grip on power, you can also see why it becomes such an important social issue who gets into the university. There are some pretty infamous secret societies at Oxford where the power brokers of the future meet and plan national domination. Unfortunately, I can't really talk about this because I was never invited to any of them. But then again, if I had been, I probably wouldn't want to reveal their secrets either, would I?
[00:10:37.550] - Oliver (Host)
Part of this idea that Oxford is elitist relates to the common misconception internationally that Oxford is a private university or more expensive than other UK universities. In reality, all UK universities are independent and funded partially by tuition fees and government support. There are a few truly private universities in the UK, but none of them are actually the famous ones. All public universities, including Oxford, charge the same tuition fees. The situation in the UK is very different, therefore, from the system in the USA and even continental Europe. Within the UK, one of the principal criticisms of Oxford is that too many of its students were educated in private school until the age of 18, that is, just before going to university. Private schools are independent schools which charge a fee to students to attend, unlike state schools, which are educational institutions run by the government. Some of the most famous private schools include St. Paul's and Eton, but there is a huge range in terms of prestige, exam results, and fees or costs to attend. Confusingly, a small selection of these private independent schools are called public schools. Ironically, these are the most traditional private schools, and they shouldn't be confused with state schools in the UK, which are what would normally be called public in other countries.
[00:12:07.140] - Oliver (Host)
Very confusing, right? These private schools send a disproportionate number of students to Oxford, a reflection of broader inequalities in education. Private school students often achieve better A-level results due to smaller class sizes, as well as the fact that their families have more disposable income available for books, resources, and even private tutoring. Oxford, unsurprisingly, draws on the students with the best grades in general, and due to socioeconomic factors beyond Oxford's remit, this does result in disproportionate numbers of private school students. We could however, also consider the fact that most private schools have tough entrance exams, which means that the students who attend these schools may already have above-average attainment levels, which are then bolstered, improved, supported by these additional advantages. Some people would definitely accuse Oxford's tutors and professors of simply preferring the private school students, feeling that they are in some way culturally closer to themselves. But having met many Oxford tutors, I don't actually really think that that is accurate, and I don't think that's why there are more private school students. In any case, this situation has changed and continues to change. By 2021, the proportion of students admitted to Oxford from state schools rose to 68.6%. The proportion of students who do A-Levels or the International Baccalaureate in a state school rather than private is around 82%, so you can see the disparity between these two figures of about 14%, but that difference is much smaller than in the past.
[00:13:52.630] - Oliver (Host)
It should also be noted, however, that if we look at the younger students, that is, GCSE students, those aged 16 and below, the proportion of state school students rises significantly. But to be fair to Oxford, it can't admit students who don't apply, and it arguably can't be blamed for socioeconomic inequalities further down the school system. Oxford does also use its considerable cash reserves to support students with financial need. The philosophy is that no one should be disqualified from studying at Oxford because of a lack of financial means. And Oxford does put its money where its mouth is, that is, take action to improve the situation. When I went to Oxford towards the end of the 'noughties' (2000s), it was definitely true that there were quite a lot of private school students there. For the most part, you couldn't really tell whether someone had gone to a private school or not unless they told you. That was something that was very, very common at my college. Mine was a very political left-wing college, but you got an interesting mix of people nonetheless. Some people were very eager to tell you that they had gone to a failing comprehensive state school to emphasise the impressiveness of their having reached Oxford despite the many problems they had faced in getting there.
[00:15:10.050] - Oliver (Host)
Others were equally eager to tell you that they were the latest in a long line of many generations of their family to have gone to a given private school because they really wanted to emphasise their blue-bloodedness, that is, their aristocratic background. There were some people at my college who not only went to private schools like Eton, but were actually amongst the richest students at that already very wealthy school. This is the school, after all, where Prince William and Prince Harry were students. In general, though, most people fell into a group in the middle, where they either went to a small private school or ordinary state schools, and they didn't really feel that interested in discussing it that much, and you really couldn't tell the difference between these people. Alongside the private state school ratio, Oxford is also criticised for lacking in diversity in terms of its student body. However, in terms of ethnicity, Oxford is largely representative of the UK in general when taking ethnic minorities as a whole. The proportion of Oxford students identifying as Black and Minority Ethnic (BaME) was 23.6% in 2021. In 2022, about 26% of students in English schools were BaME.
[00:16:27.930] - Oliver (Host)
There may be disproportionate numbers amongst individual ethnicities, though, as we often see in US universities. This would definitely seem to be the case in my experience. To be frank, there were many white students and many students from the Far East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, as well as quite a few from the Middle East when I was at university. However, there were many fewer students from Black ethnic backgrounds, and I think that this is a little unclear from the statistics that Oxford publishes. But this discrepancy has been flagged in UK newspapers quite a bit, and I think that Oxford has made lots of efforts to attract students from all ethnic backgrounds. But to be honest with you, I can't really comment on how successful it has been because I can't find the statistics for it.
[00:17:10.980] - Oliver (Host)
But before I talk about what it was like to actually study there, I need to talk about the admission system for the time when I applied. The belief that it's pretty hard to get in is true. Firstly, you need virtually perfect grades. That meant, at the time that I applied, getting all A*s in your GCSEs or as close to that as you possibly could.
[00:17:32.920] - Oliver (Host)
The university does, of course, make exceptions to that rule, but they are rare. Most students have nearly perfect grades, and the application process is rigorous. Firstly, I sent off my application with some sample essays and a personal statement, which is not specifically for Oxford. You apply to all universities with the same one-page statement of why you want to study the course you've applied for. In the UK, you usually choose one major subject to study. It's not like a US liberal arts education where you may have majors and various minors. You can study joint honours degrees, but it's not very common. I studied something called Classics, which is the study of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, their languages, ancient Greek and Latin, and then the philosophy, literature, art, history, etc, of these cultures and their neighbours. e.g. Persia and Ancient Egypt. After you submit your grades, essays, and personal statement, you are then invited to come to Oxford for an interview if you are lucky. I had five in-person interviews, for example, plus language exams during a three-day stay at the college that I applied to. Nowadays, pre-interview exams and the interviews themselves are conducted online, which from my point of view, is a shame because it misses the immersive experience.
[00:19:02.830] - Oliver (Host)
Students today, at least, are spared the stress of sitting in the college's lounge and waiting for the list of interviewees to be published on the wall. I remember it all getting very tense when someone would enter with the latest list. If your name was on it, you were going home. But was that because you had done such an amazing job early on that they didn't need to waste more time interviewing you? Or had you had such a disaster that the idea of giving you a place had become a joke? You didn't find out, and you were left with all these questions running through your mind for the month or two before you heard back. As part of your application, you need to choose a college within the University of Oxford to apply to. Oxford itself isn't a single unified campus, but a collection of around 30 colleges. Each college functions almost like its own little universe, with accommodation, dining halls, and a junior common room, the JCR, where students socialise. The subject that you do has almost no bearing on which college you go to. Almost all of the big colleges offer almost all of the subjects.
[00:20:14.340] - Oliver (Host)
Some students will barely ever leave their college. Others will spend every moment they can trying to escape its claustrophobically small size. Tourists often ask for directions to the university, but it doesn't actually exist as a single entity. But some of these colleges are exactly what you'd expect if you think of Oxford. They give the city its famous alternate name of the City of Dreaming Spires. Some of the more modern colleges are very different. I would advise looking up Christchurch, Keble, and St. Catherine's College to see the huge range of the kinds of places you could study at while at Oxford. I chose my college on the basis of age: it was more than 700 years old in my case. Location: most people want something central, but not everyone. And then idiosyncratic reputation; this means any strange features that it's famous for. For example, Wadham, which I didn't go to, was known for being exceptionally left wing and exceptionally gay when I was at the university. Christchurch was huge, beautiful, and extremely posh, and incidentally, one of the principal filming locations for Hogwarts and Harry Potter. The atmosphere in each college is quite different, but most students end up loving the college that they attend, even if they didn't actually apply to that one in the first place.
[00:21:39.800] - Oliver (Host)
One of the big ways that the ambiance of a college can impact your life is through student politics, which is a significant aspect of life at Oxford. As I mentioned previously, a huge number of our Prime Ministers are Oxford graduates, and they certainly sharpen their political skills while at the university. You often get hacked by students running for the Oxford Union, a famous debating society. Hacking is when these students approach you, pretending that you've been friends for years just to secure your vote in the upcoming elections, even if you haven't spoken since some drunken rambling at 3:00 AM during Freshers' Week, the first week of the year. Hacking is an Oxford tradition that illustrates the University's unique social dynamics with intelligent, ambitious young people genuinely believing that these are the first steps on their road to power. And the thing that makes it unique and arguably quite depressing is that they're probably right.
[00:22:39.200] - Oliver (Host)
Loving your subject is crucial at Oxford. The education at Oxford is exceptionally demanding, and it's genuinely just too much if you don't relish the opportunity to study your subject in-depth. The terms are extremely short. They're only eight weeks each, but they are intense.
[00:22:57.970] - Oliver (Host)
In general, we wrote two essays a week when I was at university, in addition to all of the lectures that you have to go to. Each of those essays may have about 15 to 20 books on the reading list. My friends at other universities often told me that they had essay assignments perhaps once a term. It simply wasn't possible at Oxford to read through all that material for each essay. I did want a life after all. It's also really hard to balance your studies with the other extracurricular activities that you want to do to fill out your CV alongside the social stuff. People do manage it, but it's genuinely tiring. It feels rather more like a job than other universities, I think. In general, Oxford students work hard and they often party just as hard. They need a release from the constant academic pressure. For many students, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, and a lot of sleeping around, to be frank, at Oxford. Probably more than most people expect from a university like that. I think that academic pressure leads, in fact, to many students overusing these external releases, and the university's mental health services were frequently overwhelmed when I was at Oxford.
[00:24:10.780] - Oliver (Host)
Anyway, this situation may have improved now. It is 2024 after all, and mental health is one of today's biggest buzzwords. But part of the pressure comes from the fact that unlike in other universities, most teaching is done in small tutorials with just one other student and a tutor who is often a world-renowned expert. Every time you do an essay, you will have a corresponding tutorial where you will go and discuss that essay. So instead of being anonymous in a massive lecture hall, surrounded by your peers, it's literally just you, one other student, and the professor. It's daunting to have your essays dissected every week by someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. Similarly, the tutorial system means that you get very used to a fellow student listening to and picking apart your arguments. You have to develop an academic thick skin and get used to defending the ideas that you scrawled down at 8:00 AM just before the tutorial with a hangover. Some tutors you'd like and some you wouldn't. But unlike in most universities, you couldn't just skip a lecture or sit at the back if you didn't really like the vibe of the lecturer.
[00:25:22.740] - Oliver (Host)
These tutorials are mandatory, of course, and they are really intimate. You're literally going into the offices of these academics and spending hours a week with them. If there's any friction between you or your tutorial partner and the tutor, I can tell you from experience that it gets genuinely pretty awkward.
[00:25:42.070] - Oliver (Host)
Exams are another major challenge. My entire four-year degree was assessed over a two-and-a-half week period at the end. What I mean by that is that none of the other work I did during the degree counted towards the final grade until those last few weeks. You remember what I said before about the mental health services at Oxford being overwhelmed? Well, this must definitely have been the case during Finals, during those final exams. It wasn't unusual to see students walking around the quads at midnight, taking a break from an all-night session in the library, crying on the phone to their parents. It was a test of endurance as much as intellect. I'm not judging these students. I was one, unfortunately. Looking back, I regret not appreciating the experience more at the time. University in general sometimes feels wasted on 18-year-olds who lack the maturity to fully grasp the opportunities before them and I think that's even more the case often for Oxford. I definitely didn't study enough. I left Oxford with good grades, but the last couple of months were horribly intense as I tried to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I felt like I did nothing but study, and I was still leaving so much up to chance. If different questions had come up during my final exams, I felt like I easily could have failed.
[00:27:05.360] - Oliver (Host)
I think the other thing I did far too often was procrastinate. Sometimes I felt like I shouldn't go out and enjoy myself because I needed to work harder, but I couldn't bring myself to work either because I felt so depressed, so I ended up doing basically nothing, paralysed by my guilty procrastination.
[00:27:22.770] - Oliver (Host)
At the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned that I haven't really wanted to talk about Oxford on the Spanish podcast previously. Partly, it's because, as I said, everyone has an opinion about Oxford, and sometimes I would rather just not have the ensuing conversation, the conversation that follows. I actually have an example from this very week with someone at the gym, and this is despite having left Oxford more than a decade ago.
[00:27:49.050] - Oliver (Host)
This very nice young guy had come up to me a couple of times in the last few weeks to compliment me on my gym progress and to discuss form on certain lifts. And on the most recent occasion, he started asking me more questions about my life. He wanted to know what I did for a living, how old I was, and even asked where I had studied. When I told him I had gone to Oxford, there was a slightly awkward moment where he paused, and then he told me his dad had gone to Cambridge, and that he'd applied to Oxford but hadn't gotten in, and wasn't sure what they were looking for, etc. etc. It was a totally inoffensive conversation, of course, but that one word, Oxford, resulted in, like, a 10-minute chat about interview technique, discussion of school type, that is, private versus state, class systems in the UK, employment prospects after university, and so on. Similarly, a common response is to tell me that they'd never wanted to go to Oxford anyway. Ultimately, of course, I don't care whether someone wanted to go to Oxford or not. It's got nothing to do with me and it has no impact on my life.
[00:28:54.210] - Oliver (Host)
But it's a strange situation with Oxford where these uncomfortable conversations can result from a single word response to a question, whereas other top universities in the UK (UCL, Imperial, LSE, Edinburgh) pass by without any comment at all. So that's my experience of being an Oxford student. It was an intense, challenging, and sometimes overwhelming experience, but it was a formative experience to make me who I am today.
[00:29:20.870] - Oliver (Host)
Thank you for listening. I hope you found this glimpse into the world of Oxford interesting, or as always, at least beneficial to your English comprehension. If you have any questions or comments on today's episode, please do send me an email at oliver@morethanalanguage.com.
Comments