Oxford Uni as a fresher - do you get weekdays off? how much free time do you get?

At Oxford University, do you ever have weekdays off, or only weekends? There's this concert I really want to go to in my first term as a fresher that's in London and is in november on a random tuesday. Do you think there's any way I could go without telling my college that I'm going for a concert?

Reply 1

Scienceisgood

During my BSc, we went to uni daily but it was not have anything on the second half on Wednesday.

Truth be told, I did not attend Oxford but I was attending Uni daily, just not a full 8 hour day (minus a few exceptions).

So I think it might depend on your course.

Reply 2

sfp04

It really depends on what your subject is. If you’re doing a humanities course, the only issue is if you have a tutorial or class which would clash. In that case it might still be possible to get around though, especially if there are multiple groups (which I guess is pretty likely if you’re taking a compulsory first year paper) and you could just swap into another which didn’t clash; in my experience, most tutors are perfectly happy for students to swap among themselves like that so long as you shoot them a quick email to let them know beforehand, and you don’t have to provide an excuse or anything. If you can’t swap groups, you could also ask the tutor and your tutorial partners if they’re willing to move the tutorial to another time — this is perhaps a bit more risky and will depend on the tutor’s availability etc.

Lectures tend not to be compulsory in any sense, and you can always catch up on them because at the very least the slides/notes (and sometimes a recording) should be posted to Canvas. If it turns out you don’t have any academic commitments on the day in question then you’re free to come and go as you please — it’s a university, not a prison (or worse, a boarding school…)! In general, the kind of thing you’re describing is not uncommon at all — subject to the above constraints, there definitely are students who will leave Oxford during the week to visit family or go to events in London.

As I said, this more applies to humanities courses, where you will generally only have a few compulsory contact hours a week. If you’re doing a science then labs may present more of a difficulty in getting out of if they clash.

Reply 3

TypicalNerd

Original post by Anonymous

Depends on your course.

As a chemist at St John’s, going into my second year, my experience last year was that all the tutes, lectures and labs were on weekdays (tutes on mondays and tuesdays, labs on thursdays and fridays and 2 morning lectures on each weekday) and nothing was scheduled for weekends and so you could use them for revision / relaxation.

As above, you don’t necessarily have to attend lectures (for science subjects it is strongly recommended) and you can access recordings of them on Panopto if necessary (but the quality of the audio in the recordings can be poor) and the handouts on Canvas.

Reply 4

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

At university you're an independent adult. You can choose what you spend your time on, but the consequences of those choices are yours to bear.

Reply 5

Stiffy Byng

Original post by Anonymous

To add the some of the comments above, Oxford is not Hogwarts, or the Army. The colleges are no longer impregnable fortresses which lock up at 9.05 pm each night. Breaking into or out of your college at night is no longer an Oxford sport or pastime.

Nobody checks where you are spending the night. Subject to commitments to tutorials etc, you organise your time as you wish. As noted already, lectures are optional and some humanities students go to no lectures.

It's maybe a good idea to plan to work about 35 to 40 hours a week if you can, but also to take some time off and relax.

The Oxtube will get you to London and back fairly quickly and cheaply, and it runs 24/7.

Have fun.

(edited 2 months ago)

Reply 6

eeeli

Original post by Anonymous

At Oxford I regularly went to concerts in London on weekdays and never had any problems. I also used to do student drama and for the bigger shows I'd be spending basically all day every day for a week in the middle of term in the theatre for tech rehearsals - never had any issues with this as long as I showed up to my contact hours and got work done where I could. Oxford is generally more chill than you'd expect, they just want you to be making academic progress and aside from contact hours there aren't any rules about when you do the work to achieve that, and your college won't care if you take a weekday off/come back late on a weeknight.