What you wish you'd been told before coming to Oxford

What I wish I'd been told before coming...

- To not be a wimp throughout the first two terms and put off taking up rowing until the third term, because it's absolutely awesome and I wish I'd rowed in Christchurch Regatta with the rest of my year. That said, I'll get to know the new freshers by the wonderful medium of sharing painfully early and cold outings with them this October.

- To avoid old, (apparently) charming DPhil'ers who seem too good to be true. They are, and tend to **** one over.

- That it is actually ok to leave Oxford for a weekend and go home to avoid 6th week blues!

- That the Alternative Tuck Shop should be visited on the first day of 0th week rather than halfway through Hilary!

- To bring warm clothes in winter and strappy tops in summer. Crazy micro-climate.

What I wish I'd been told before coming...

- To not be a wimp throughout the first two terms and put off taking up rowing until the third term, because it's absolutely awesome and I wish I'd rowed in Christchurch Regatta with the rest of my year. That said, I'll get to know the new freshers by the wonderful medium of sharing painfully early and cold outings with them this October.

- To avoid old, (apparently) charming DPhil'ers who seem too good to be true. They are, and tend to **** one over.

- That it is actually ok to leave Oxford for a weekend and go home to avoid 6th week blues!

- That the Alternative Tuck Shop should be visited on the first day of 0th week rather than halfway through Hilary!

- To bring warm clothes in winter and strappy tops in summer. Crazy micro-climate.

- To avoid old, (apparently) charming DPhil'ers who seem too good to be true. They are, and tend to **** one over.

I've gone home for the weekend at the end of every fifth week, and I think it's for the best. It helps me get through the last few weeks of term.

How are you doing that much?

I like getting 100 haha and if I don't I feel guilty for some reason

I like getting 100 haha and if I don't I feel guilty for some reason

- That the Alternative Tuck Shop should be visited on the first day of 0th week rather than halfway through Hilary!

iii) The ATS gets boring (also expensive) eventually, and they also don't seem to understand the words "no cucumber".

- that being somebody who doesn't work well unless there's an imminent deadline isn't good.

- that you can love oxford and hate it a lot at the same time.

- that choosing my degree based on it being oxford (which is what i did really), and based on the course being one that i thought would be good for me, rather than one that i would actively enjoy, was completely stupid.

Do you not like English Lit then? I used to miss English Lit. Much as I loved doing a Music degree, I did occasionally get a yearning for Shakespeare or Chaucer Soon fixed that with my medieval play malarkey

i love english lit - but i get on very badly with the way the course is structured. it's very historical and i get very little choice - basically i want to focus more on criticism & theory, and modern literature, and i just... can't. my own fault for choosing the course, but it's frustrating. ah well, only a year to go

I can kinda empathise, coz I had the same problem with Mods (though fortunately for me, things changed after that). I was very lucky that lots of pop options popped up for my Finals

Hopefully the Special Topics paper or whatever it is will give you something you can really get your teeth into next year?

i love english lit - but i get on very badly with the way the course is structured. it's very historical and i get very little choice - basically i want to focus more on criticism & theory, and modern literature, and i just... can't. my own fault for choosing the course, but it's frustrating. ah well, only a year to go

I thought the English course at Oxford was really flexible and free, and that you had loads of choice?
is it particular to your college? I'm hopefully a Teddy Hall fresher (for English) and was expecting quite a lot of freedom in the course...

on another note, which course would you have done if not for English lit?

I don't know how it works at Teddy Hall, but I'd agree that the course is probably less flexible than many other English courses. At some universities you might be able to avoid certain centuries or periods altogether, whereas that doesn't really work. At my college, we weren't really given a choice about whether we wanted to do Old English or Middle English, for example - we all did Old English whether we wanted to do or not. Similarly, there was never any question of avoiding the Victorian or Modern papers.

It's been all right for me, though. I think it depends on your own preferences, but even when we were given a choice between three writers for one week (Eliot, Yeats or Auden), it was still a choice, and by the end of term our tutors were usually fine with us writing about whoever we wanted to. Although there are some exceptions. Someone in my class wanted to write an essay on Rimbaud one week, but couldn't because it would mean studying him in translation, and we're only supposed to focus on writers who originally wrote in the English language. So that's slightly annoying, I suppose.

Thanks. It sounds alright actually - doing a bit of everything gives you a broad knowledge.
Just a tad nervous about the workload!