New Horizons - Life in Oxford and New Website Functions
Posted on September 30, 2009 by Roc Lee
This has been quite an eventful year for me; settling down at Catholic University and getting involved with SCI, 24-Hour Musical Festival, composition recitals, Campus Movie Festival, and 48-Hour Film Festival; taking on an internship at Provisions Library over the summer, working on the Fringe, and organizing a recital. These last few days I've finally been able to catch my breath and get caught up on staying organized. But all that will change again next week when the new term starts here at Oxford University.
Yup, for the next three months I will be studying at Oxford University as an associate student at New College. Oxford is based on the collegiate system, so each student is a member of one of 38 colleges. The function of "Oxford University" is simply for testing and conferring degrees; the way the British like to describe it is like the Federal Government versus State Governments. The school year doesn't actually start until October, so for the past month I have been taking a tutorial on Shakespeare. For those of you who don't know, Oxford teaches using the tutorial system, where the student meets once a week with his/her Tutor who will assign an essay topic and possibly a reading list. The student is then expected to read as much as they can, write an essay, and defend it at the tutorial meeting. It sounds pretty intense (and it is), but I am really enjoying it and surprisingly my problem has been reading too much material. I have never gone so in depth with Shakespeare before and for the first time I understand why he is so highly regarded as a playwright.
Yup, for the next three months I will be studying at Oxford University as an associate student at New College. Oxford is based on the collegiate system, so each student is a member of one of 38 colleges. The function of "Oxford University" is simply for testing and conferring degrees; the way the British like to describe it is like the Federal Government versus State Governments. The school year doesn't actually start until October, so for the past month I have been taking a tutorial on Shakespeare. For those of you who don't know, Oxford teaches using the tutorial system, where the student meets once a week with his/her Tutor who will assign an essay topic and possibly a reading list. The student is then expected to read as much as they can, write an essay, and defend it at the tutorial meeting. It sounds pretty intense (and it is), but I am really enjoying it and surprisingly my problem has been reading too much material. I have never gone so in depth with Shakespeare before and for the first time I understand why he is so highly regarded as a playwright.
Oxford itself is a lovely town, and despite prejudices against English weather, the past month has been very sunny and mild. (I'm told that will change but I don't like to be pessimistic) Oxford itself is a lovely town that exhudes an atmosphere of academia with its ancient architecture (alliteration just comes so naturally to me :p). I can't wait until the colleges open and I get to read in places like this on the left. (The picture at the left was taken in the chapel of University College.)
Notice that you can now add comments to any post, there are functioning tags to help with navigation and categorization, and it is now easier to share any page with friends via the "share this" button in the top right under the title.
I also finally decided to get twitter. The idea of twitter was really quite fascinating once I got over my snobbery issues. But I will go into more detail on that in another post.