YES!
Alex Rankine
I am writing this at 4.30 in the morning. Macroeconomic wage theories have been hanging over me the entire night like a grim-faced gargoyle but even less pretty. The main equilibrium I am trying to preserve right now is mental, which is strung between the twin poles of caffeine-fired desperation and the primal, Maslovian need for sleep.
Things did not have to be thus. I could have treated my degree like a job, dutifully arising with the rowers at dawn for a healthy breakfast before settling down in the library. I could have done all the reading on the list, carefully considered all the subtle gradations and different angles one could take on the issue, and set to my work with a profound mastery of the material. But that would be all too sensible now wouldn’t it?
University is not a nine-to-five gig. At any given hour somewhere in college there will be somebody working. We work at 3am, we work at 7pm, we work on the biblical day of rest and get annoyed by the ringing bells. More pertinently, we procrastinate at all of those times, a process every bit as taxing as work. Procrastination is an Oxford institution. We spend far more time with it than we do our friends, ignoring its guilt-inducing looks when we linger in hall, coming back from evenings out with it in tow and taking it to bed with us.
The lack of enforced structure in our days (scientists aside) is one cause of exhaustion, but is there a workload issue specific to Oxford? Certainly, we get a great deal of the stuff; three chunky assignments in a week is par for the course. Sometimes the quantities become absurd and it transpires that our tutors are not talking to each other and thought we did not have much else on this week. But we knew we would get a lot when we signed up for this. One of the attractions of Oxford is that by the time you leave you will know far more about your subject than students at other more easy-going institutions, even if that knowledge is simply to realise that what seemed straightforward at A-level is in fact a subject of fathomless depths, an ineffable sea of centuries-accumulated scholarship. Oxford makes us go swimming in this ocean a lot more than most universities. Drowning may be the more apposite description at Oxford.
I would venture that a major part of the problem is the eight week term, which demands that learning be conducted at a breathless pace, and leads to the ridiculous situation where most of us are at home for nearly as much of the year as we are at university. It is understandable why our beloved tutors want us to clear-off and leave them to their research for as much of the year as possible, but the consequences are dire for students.
Our University existences become an intense bubble that admits little room for unplanned circumstances. Those who have been made to feel sorry for daring to fall ill during term-time will know what I mean. And the skills that such an intense system builds are not primarily academic. Both Cherwell and OxStu have run pieces this year about how student degrees feel more like blagging than learning. These early morning turn-arounds and the need to chance your way weekly through job-interview style tutes may be good practice for life in the corporate world, but that is surely not what Oxford is trying to prepare us for?
NO!
Anna Cooban
Any wander through your college library at 2am will tell you that students at Oxford work harder than the average student. The characteristic dark shadows under the eyes, pale complexion and a general sense of hollowness are symptomatic of the exam period – or what other students may call ‘summer’. It is certainly true that the workload undertaken by the average Oxford student is far from average, but is this ‘too’ much? My answer is no.
Perhaps nobody can quite prepare for the academic onslaught they will face in their first ever Michaelmas. No one can reinforce enough how prevalent the ‘little-fish-in-a-big-pond’ syndrome really is when you arrive and discover that your neighbour is a world debating champion fluent in 5 different languages or that your college mum has already been headhunted by NASA. Suddenly your paltry three or four A to A* A-level gradesseem far less impressive. However, to suggest that the workload surpasses our expectations or is too much to handle is to suggest that freshers walk into these hallowed halls only to be surprised that Oxford is not like most other universities.
Quite frankly, you get what you sign up for. The extra demands required by an Oxford degree are certainly a shock to a system honed by the helpful rigidity of A-level mark schemes and – in many cases – the support of eager teachers. To discover that your tutor has a career beyond marking your essays shatters any hubristic illusion that students are the centre of Oxford’s intellectual sphere when, arguably, the greatest product of this institution is its wealth of academic research.
Nobody is forced to work particularly hard and there are certainly many who choose to do the bare minimum, content with the strangely revered ‘gentleman’s third’. The late Christopher Hitchens is a testament to this philosophy. Not content with the trappings of an Oxford degree or the impending sense of lifelong failure should he fail to work to 3am on a Friday night, he told the system where they could stick it and became one of the most prominent thinkers of his generation, due in large part to his departure from the mainstream.
Carol Vorderman is another whose Cambridge third did not hamper her success as a mathematician, nor did Hugh Laurie’s third prevent him from winning two Golden Globe awards. And for those that choose a no less admirable, yet still ‘conventional’, path from top degree to top job in the City, three years stuck in the confines of the college library is but a snapshot of the work-life imbalances suffered by an investment banker or commercial lawyer. Working hard is therefore self-inflicted and although some degree of pity is warranted for the prelims student who is in the library earliest and leaves latest, these types are usually so ambitious that, whatever their academic outcome, professional success is a given.
There is no doubt that Oxford students work hard. There may have been a discrepancy between our expectations and the reality of our workload before we arrived, but this is no way disproportionate to demands of the stereotypical Oxbridge graduate job. Perhaps a 30- year subscription to Vitamin D supplements is a worthwhile investment if we choose to continue down the path of being conventional.
