It is 11 A.M., and I am currently sitting in a small coffee shop trying to recover from a lecture on the philosophy of mind with a latte and a slice of chocolate cake. Still warming up from a chilly morning walk, it feels like fall for the first time since starting college. For a New England girl, this weather is perfect.
It’s funny – the accents have begun to fade into the background after a month here in Oxford. The streets are finally making sense, and I look the proper way before crossing them. The country, the culture, and the Oxford university system are so different from the United States – the last is perhaps the most strikingly different. Oxford is based on a tutorial system. I have a primary tutorial once a week and a secondary every other week. A tutorial consists of submitting and discussing an essay I have written with a professor here at the university. Then I go to four different lecture series that are taught by other professors. They assign reading lists for everything, so most of the week is spent reading and trying to set a world speed record in the 1500 word dash while retaining some appearance that I know the material.
There is a lot more freedom with arranging your time since the only homework is due basically once or twice a week. The tutorial system makes for a really intensive 8 weeks studying one topic in detail, which is the inverse approach to the BIC. In spite of this difference, the grounding that the BIC lay in history, politics, and sociology has been incredibly beneficial in understanding political theory – my main area of focus this term.
While official term began this week, the previous month was spent listening to lectures about British culture, going on field trips to important landmarks around England, and writing papers synthesizing what we had learned in British culture lectures with our main areas of study. The lecturers chose to focus on how we remember and misremember narratives throughout history. For a minute, I felt like I was back in Morrison for World Cultures, and loved seeing the intellectual connection of academic thought four thousand miles apart.
Currently, both the United States and England are in the middle of a definitive narrative period of change and uncertainty. The concern here over Brexit is startlingly similar to the anxiety induced by the current election cycle. Oxford, as a city, voted to stay in the European Union, and it is fairly common to hear professors voicing their shock over how the decision went. I get the scarcely comfortable feeling that no one really knows what is going to happen in the next few months either here in the U.K. or home in the U.S. That being said, it is comforting to know that this controversial period is not the end of the story – just the middle. We hope.
The coffee shop, which, incidentally, is in an awesome vault beneath a church, bans laptops from twelve to two so I need to wrap this and myself back up and head out into the autumn air. Even though it seems like the world is in crisis, there are also blue skies and falling leaves and a heck of a lot of beauty in this place, and for that, I am undyingly grateful.
Becca Richards is a junior BIC and University Scholar student with a focus in philosophy.