My son is probably going to be studying at Oxford for 6 months come January 2005. It's a tough decision. I plan to visit him while he is there. What can you tell me about Oxford--either the city or the university---either pro or con?

For me, it's a small, pretty town, and I enjoy visiting. I have friends who live there, though, so we stay with them. My girlfriend's daughter spent a year abroad (from UC Berkeley) and loved studying there.

Hi adam,

We found it to be a very pleasant daytrip from London.

For graduate study Oxford is good, but whether outstanding depends on his field of study and choice of optional studies. For undergraduate study it shares with Cambrige the glory of having kept supervision, the system whereunder he writes a weekly essay for a tutor, a professor (in the American sense), who gives him an hour s tutorial to discuss the essay and to go on to other points that relate to the topic. In either case he needs to motivate himself: nobody is going to make him work at his best, but if he chooses lecture series that he likes, and reads at length in college and university library he can find himself up at midnight, reluctant to stop reading.

In the humanities at least Oxford does not train young people. It educates them (the Latin educare means draws them out), to look at facts and opinions and form their own.

Please write if I can help further. So long as he foes not need a nurse to hold his hand this is a lucky lad.

[email protected]

To get any useful advice here, you really have got to be a lot more specific.

The University of Oxford specialises is producing highly articulate people - in speech and in writing. In the past 800 years the university's members have churned out billions of words about the place, most of which you can easily access. And presumably you already have read a lot of them.

Although in Britain recently it's become depressingly fashionable for some young people with chips on their shoulders to avoid our only two (indeed Europe's only two) world-class universities, few people here with any sense would regard going to the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge as a tough decision, if they had the opportunity.

So what is it that makes it a tough decision for you? By telling us that, you might get some useful pros and cons. Somehow, I suspect that being told the city's a pleasant daytrip from London doesn't help you a lot.

Incidentally, you say 'studying at Oxford". Do you mean at the oldest, still outstanding, university in the English-speaking world, at some semi-fraudulent language school located over a chip shop (of which there are dozens), or at one of the city's other respectable, quite excellent in some disciplines, but hardly stellar, institutions like Brookes University?

flanneruk, my son has been accepted to Oxford University. It is a tough decision for him for several reasons. He loves learning, and as a junior at one of the premiere universities in the United States, has done incredibly well. But he is intimidated by Oxford. He is also concerned that his abroad moment will totally become study time only---with no time to visit and see parts of England and Europe. We are thrilled that he has the opportunity to go to Oxford, but also want him to be able to experience and learn about something other than the United States. I thought via this site, I might be able to get a 'picture' of what Oxford the town is like to share with him, and also perhaps some insight into what the demands of studying at Oxford University would be like. Will it be totally consuming? Let me stress, that his current demands have been quite intense.

It will be demanding for him. Do you know what college he will be applying to? My friend's daughter read at Magdalen College. Even though the daughter is bright and articulate, she found the first few months difficult in this highly competitive, highly specialized atmosphere. Not so much the workload or degree of difficulty, but rather trying to prove herself. It wasn't until she went out for rowing half-way through that she learned to relax a bit. If your son is good at making friends and not be terribly hard on himself, he will probably enjoy his experience. Yes, there will be times that he will be able to take off and explore the countryside, and he will have the time and the opportunity to explore the town itself, but to maintain good grades, he will have to apply himself as I am sure he does at the university he attends. I think it will be a good experience for him unless he lacks the self confidence and stresses too much.

It would be a good idea for him to get input from students from the university he attends who studied in Oxford (and particularly those who attended the college he plans to attend) so he will have some insight as to what will be expected of him.

Good luck with his decision.

Oxford is surprisingly undemanding, officially, of its undergraduates. Some science and medical courses require attendance at classes, but in the humanities (which dominate heavily) virtually the only absolute requirement is presenting an acceptable essay at one or two tutorials a week. It's generally the student's discretion which lectures he attends (or doesn't). "Grades" are a non-issue to people doing full undergraduate degrees (the only thing that counts really is the class you get in your final degree), though whether your son's university makes some demands about this is a different matter. The essay cycle is what dominates undergraduate academic life in most subjects.

This varies somewhat by course: it doesn't vary in any predictable way by college, though many of the informal pressures will vary by college, by peer group and by local whim. Tutorials are frequently given to two or more people at once: so predictably, an undergraduate's tutorial ("tute&quotpartner(s) can be a more important target audience than the tutor, both for the written essay and in the discussion that follows it.

IN practice, the system usually requires undergraduates to assimilate critically at least half a dozen or so books a week. How demanding this is of undergraduates is a matter of personality. The place has a long history of people doing any amount of other things at the same time: the most common characteristic that gains cred among undergraduates is the ability to assimilate - or at least be seen to assimilate - the required information and turn it into an original, lucid, well-written, thoughtful, essay without letting it get in the way of the more important business of drinking, chasing the opposite sex and whatever drama, journalism, extreme sports etc the undergraduate's really there for. I'd suggest the real competitiveness isn't about academic (or any other quantifiable) performance, but about the stylishness with which academic stuff is balanced with real life.

There is some evidence that people from British private schools have been trained from an early age in the skills of doing this more easily than those educated in other systems.

Certainly some Americans do suffer a culture shock at a system that can be very different from the one they've taken for granted. Your last President, for example, spent several decades blaming Oxford, rather than himself, for his unimpressive performance during his time there.

However well your son adapts to this, the living arrangements - assuming he's in college - will force him into quite close intimacy with the people he tutes with, eats with and shares a staircase with. Unless he's quite gauche, it'll be hard for him to avoid spending acres of time talking about all the stuff undergraduates do to people with very different mindsets and personal histories. He'll have to try very hard indeed (or really get the social nuances badly confused) to avoid assimilating tons about Britain, and a fair amount about the other key nationalities there. He's unlikely to get out of Oxford much during term time (but he's got the next 70 years to see Stonehenge), though formal term's only 8 weeks long.

As Surfergirl hints, if he suspects he might let the academic stuff weigh him down (and Oxford would see that as his choice, rather than the result of any pressures the college might put on him), it's probably important to commit from the beginning to specific extra-curricular stuff that will force him to switch his attention away from the essay grind. It's certainly important to find out how other people in a similar situation have made the most of the place.

And I'd suggest you (or far more importantly, he) put your energy into researching how to avoid the possible problems (which actually means how to cram as much as possible into the time), rather than worry about whether there will be problems.

There will be. Having spent much of my career in multinational businesses, I've come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn't suffer culture shock is a self-deceiving liar. The crucial thing is to recognise it and manage it, not to deny it or try to avoid it.

By all means feel free to PM me about this at [email protected]

surfergirl and flanneruk, thank you so much for your responses. I plan to forward them on to my son to chew on a bit. The big decision will have to be made while I am in Ireland (which is just as well!) so your insight will be most helpful.

flanneruk, I do plan to get back to you via e-mail post-decision. Thank you again.

The parent replied to me privately, and I replied thus.

Thank you for this added background. I see his problem. He is right that the pleasures (not demands) of learning at the university will prevent him from experiencing the town, the country and Europe as an entirety. If he wants this experience, with plenty of knowledge at high school or tourist level of cultures and ideas in Europe, he should go to some university, probably the London branch of an American university, to study European history, literature and current affairs. Most of his fellow students would be north American. If he wants to experience just a little of Europe, but in depth, with discussion of source books (not just textbooks, but translations of writings of great figures from the middle ages inwards), then he should go to Oxford. I myself have BA Hons at 2.1 level in medieval and modern history of west Europe and Britain, and should have found the study of ll the cultures and ideas in Europe shallow. A dim student would do well to take the wider course, but a lad as bright as your son wants the excitement of coming up face to face with great ideas in original writings. He knows what I mean. If during study of the American revolution he had been told that he was on a survey course, without time to read the Federalist papers, and must make do with a quick survey by a professor, he would have been disappointed.

The town of Oxford is just a town, so when you say experience the town of Oxford you must mean experience the university life of Oxford, the discussion in seminars and over late night coffee of the facts, the lies, and what follows from them. Again, he needs to look at original texts and at detail if that discussion is to be enjoyable and productive.

He should keep his passion for writing in check. His tutors will demand that he write for them (and defend his views is discussion), and he will enjoy doing that well and with precision, fine. But many young people in Oxford (an some older, such as Tolkien in his time) write a couple of hours a day or more, and publish. I think this a mistake with less than a year in Europe. Your son will do better to absorb in his months, perhaps jot down quick diary notes, and to write at length and for publication at the next stage of his life.

I admire his wish to learn of all Europe, but would put that off for a few years. On this trip I think that after study he should buy a one month InterRail pass for western, northern and central Europe. He should select for political ideas, and see
the cities of the merchant princes in Venice and Florence,
the cities of the merchant republicans of old Holland,
the palaces of the successful despots at Versailles, Schonnbrunn, and Potsdam,
the monuments of the failed fascist despots in Berlin,
the museums of the failed Stalinist despots in Ausschwitz and at checkpoint Charlie,
the two Soviet style cities of Minsk and Tiraspol (these need cheap add-on rail tickets),

I do not think he should try to see all the tourist attractions of the continent (that would mean a day per country), but leave these for later visits.

I am glad to have got this far, but should be glad to hear whether your son sees what I write, and to have his comment on it. I have a sense of working at a distance.

Ben Haines