Academic Update

Get ready. This post is about to get super real.

The past three weeks has been the most overwhelming of my life. I knew this Oxford experience would be academically rigorous, but I completely underestimated the intensity. I’m embarassed to admit that I let stress get the best of me and I haven’t been making the best choices. (Eating an entire jar of peanut butter at 3am? Maybe not my most shining moment.) So, maybe I’ve been pulling too many all-nighters and binge eating entire trays of brownies, but in my defense, I have been working my brain hard.

Look at this 1,000 page book I read in two days. Or in other words, the Oxford work load is ridiculous.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving the academics here. I feel like I’ve learned more in the last three weeks than I have in a long time. And with four essays (10,000 words) already completed for this term, I feel like I’ve done more work than I have in a long time too. And now for an update on how tutorials are actually going:

My major tutorial with Kalika at Wolfson (click here for pictures!) is definitely going. We’ve met three times and so far I’ve read and written an essay on Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Dickens’s Bleak House. I’m currently reading Browning’s Men and Women. While I’m not so big on the poetry, I’ve really enjoyed all of the reading so far. Now if only I could have longer than a couple of days to read each book, I’d have it made.

My minor tutorial with Olivia at Magdalen (click here for pictures!) is less demanding. We only meet on even weeks, so we’ve only met once. I read the introductions to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and now I’m working my way through the rest of the collection. Our first tutorial was really relaxed; we ate cookies and talked about poetry and who doesn’t like that?

My goal for the rest of the semester, besides finishing my work, is to have a better balance. Although I do spend a lot of time wandering around beautiful places (as evidenced by my photos of Magdalen and Wolfson), I want to see more outside of the library. Life is happening and I don’t want to miss it. Wish me luck!