What Do You Mean, “School”?

It seems like I’m forgetting something. There’s been a lot of prattling on about Oxford as a town and a social scene, but perhaps you’ve picked up on a glaringly large hole in my descriptions. Whatever happened to the University? In my defense, I don’t think I can be blamed entirely for neglecting to detail academia thus far: I’ve joined the Food and Cooking Club, the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, and the Women’s Campaign; I’m still considering the Fencing Club, Dancesport, Amnesty International, the Oxford Union, and Oxide Radio; I’m shortly going to be a subject in several Psychology Research groups (Brains! Electrodes! MRIs!). You’ll be pleased to note that I’ve asked to be taken off the Bacchus Wine Tasting Society and the Oxford Coxen mailing lists. The latter especially was a wrench, but I decided that I’d rather row than shout at people to row, and I’d rather sleep than do either. But this is still an educational experience, right? So what happened to all the learning? Classes? Labs? Seminars? What exactly am I doing here?

Briefly, I’ll describe an Oxford education. School here is not like it is in the States, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ll just reassure everyone that Oxford is not simply a set of old crumbly buildings with a reputation. There are big, scary names and bigger, scarier ideas to shore up both the buildings and the reputation. I haven’t yet run into Richard Dawkins, but I do know someone who spotted Kevin Spacey…as for ideas, there are at least three libraries full of them that I access whenever I want: the LMH college library (it’s literally next door to my room), the Radcliffe Science Library (just down the road), and the Bodleian Library (which apparently receives a copy of every published book in Great Britain).

So…University of Oxford. For one thing, it’s not called school (that’s for little kids), and it’s not called college (that’s a building you live in, or a community you hang around with). What one does at university is this: readings, lectures, and tutorials. First, readings: after meeting with a college tutor the first week of term to discuss the things you’d like to study, you are given reading lists. These lists are rows and rows of citations several pages long that are updated weekly and are designed to destroy the unwitting student who tries to cover them all. Instead, students read the starred and double-starred material, and then choose things that interest them out of the rest of the list. At Oxford, I don’t think there’s a good database that students can use to search for articles; apparently anything you might want to read will be on the lists that older and wiser people have prepared for you, and you shouldn’t have time to do your own research anyway. Lectures, the next element of an Oxford education, are optional…sort of. No attendance is taken, but if you don’t go, you miss out on all sorts of useful insights and notes that will tie everything together for the last bit of the university system: tutorials. Tutorials are the most unusual thing about Oxford – they’re only to be had at Oxford, in fact (well okay, and Cambridge). Traditionally, a student prepares an essay for a tutor based on reading and lectures, goes to the tutor’s rooms at least once a week, reads his work aloud to an old man in a leather wingback, and then stands back and takes it while said old man drinks port and verbally shreds the essay. Nowadays, it’s a little bit different – students and tutors can be women, as well as men. No, sorry…I guess I should disabuse you of the misconception that this is ye-olde-universitie. The psychology lecture theater here is the same as the one I sat in all last year, except that it’s a theatre, and I have yet to be offered port by a professor – all port apparently comes from the Christian Union, and the professors only dole out champagne or espresso.

As a visiting student, I’m taking one primary tutorial (this term: Brain, Learning, and Memory) and one secondary tutorial (Developmental Psychology). I met my primary subject tutor for our first session not in an oak-paneled room, but in a closet-sized office with a lot of metal filing cabinets and an incongruous stained glass window. She didn’t offer me wine or tea or even apple juice (as my college tutor had), but we did spend the first half hour discussing the plan for the next seven weeks in a friendly way…it involves a lot of reading and a short video series yayyy…. She seemed excited to learn I’m interested in neurobiology in addition to cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, and she tried to introduce me to a graduate student in her lab who is also from Pennsylvania. How can I be that person? We took a fieldtrip down to the photocopier in the basement, travelling through the narrow hallways of the Sherrington anatomy building through which interns carried cadavers in the slightly more nefarious days of anatomy studies. Who knows. Finally, we got around to discussing my essay. There were lots of check marks and good point!s in the margins, and her only real criticism was that it was a long read. It was a longer write, I thought…it turned out that overlong was the theme of the day, and we had to cut the meeting short so that I could grab a falafel wrap before lunch turned into dinner.

Well, I should probably stop writing here and start on my next tutorial topic: perception and associative memory!