Stockholm syndrome (noun): feelings of trust or affection felt by a victim towards a captor in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking.
Education folklore has it that for many years, students at MIT have scrawled the acronym ‘IHTFP’ (I hate this fucking place) around campus in an attempt to express disdain for their university. After two years at Oxford, I can now report that students here often experience similar feelings. It makes sense, though. After all, when so many of us grow up with idealised dreams and expectations – of wandering the cobbled streets, eating in the grand dining halls, and experiencing some of the best teaching the world has to offer – it’s no wonder that we can end up feeling disappointed or disillusioned with our actual experience in the ‘city of dreaming spires’.
Personally, I had envisioned myself studying at Oxford for so long and I held it to such high esteem in my mind that perhaps it was inevitable it did not meet my expectations. In my first Michaelmas, I quickly discovered that the hours were long and hard, and the volume of work too much to bear. I felt stuck between two equally bleak options – spend all my time in the library, trying desperately to understand the content and complete the endless list of work – or risk failing my exams. I felt, and I know that many others still feel, an overwhelming sense of stupidity. Whether I was sitting in the library, explaining work in a tutorial, or measuring and testing in the lab, I felt completely inadequate and utterly convinced I should never have been offered a place; perhaps my acceptance email had been an admin error my college felt too guilty to reverse. This feeling followed me around, and no matter how much I tried to ignore it, it felt impossible to get rid of. I was completely trapped in a city I had once loved.
Then there is the social side of Oxford. I have met many fantastic people here, but have still experienced my fair share of alienating experiences. There was the time when, at a crew date with another college, the first sconces included “I sconce anyone who compared the homeless people on Cornmarket street to rats”. The group erupted in shouts and jeers, while a few of us laughed in a state of shock. There was no evidence of anyone feeling embarrassed or ashamed, perhaps a slight sheepishness at best, maybe only at revealing too much in front of the wrong crowd. This was normal to them – they had their own culture, their own traditions, their own punchlines, running alongside our own. This vicious underbelly, this poorly-kept Oxford secret which rears its ugly head once in a while (often only when fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol) was suddenly illuminated, right there, standing on chairs towering above us in Jamal’s. This is something I found difficult from my arrival – the pretence that institutions like Oxford are no longer dominated by circles of students from elite backgrounds. There are only so many times that you can watch the light leave someone’s eyes when you inform them that there are no mutual private school acquaintances to bond over, because you did in fact attend a state school in the middle of nowhere. This is another reason I often feel trapped in Oxford, and even though I have met many lovely people, I regularly find myself longing to be back at home.
Oxford is an interesting place to go to university. The highs are incredibly high, the lows devastatingly low. There is possibly no better feeling than being sat in the pub after finally completing a problem sheet or feeling the sun on your face in Christ Church Meadow after a long library session. At Oxford, I think we are all oscillating between being entirely alone and entirely connected – terrified one minute, hopeful the next. We all have our own ways of coping, of dealing with the relentless work and convincing ourselves that it will all be worth it in the end. For many of us, it often feels like too much to withstand. I suppose, in a way, we are experiencing a reverse-order Stockholm syndrome – after longing to achieve a place and finally making it, we find ourselves desperate to escape.
Is the prestige of institutions like Oxford always inextricably tied to a high-stress environment? Or can it reconcile a world-class education with a more enjoyable student experience?
