The Stampede

Issue date: 11/7/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: photo from Yonatan Binyam BINYAM

I was packing a couple of bags and saying goodbye to friends, family members, Northeast Tennessee, my '99 Corolla and midnight runs to Taco Bell. It was several months after a woman spoke in chapel about study abroad programs. She said that studying abroad would be exciting, memorable, challenging and affordable.

I boarded a flight to England, and soon I was living in one of the oldest and most distinguished educational systems in the world.

Oxford has some cobblestone streets, ancient spires, thousands of bicycles, thousands of really smart people and a few million books. My feet have come to tolerate the uneven pressure from cobblestones as I walk to lectures.

After about two months, I have even learned to walk past the famous Bodleian Library or Radcliffe Camera without staring at them like a tourist. I now feel comfortable with the less-than-perfect traffic laws that require cyclists to share the road with cars and double-decker buses.

The leaves are starting to accompany the rain as it falls to the ground, but one tends to notice less and less when obligated to complete a daunting load of reading and writing assignments.

I think tutorials are what make the Oxford experience unique. They involve my receiving a question from a scholar, reading a bunch of books to answer that question and meeting that scholar once a week to go over all the red marks with which he or she decorated my essay.

Sitting across the table from a seasoned scholar and trying to defend an argument I took a little less than a week to construct (concerning a subject in which the person opposite me received no less than a doctorate degree) is one of the best educational methods I have come across.

This challenging curriculum is further enriched by the almost limitless resources available to the Oxford student through the impressive libraries. There are a lot of books in Oxford for a reason: everybody here reads. For example, I once walked past a homeless man and he was reading a book.

In addition to tutorials, Oxford provides a considerable number of lectures in every field of study imaginable. All students have the freedom to attend as many lectures as their desires and schedules will allow. My scheduling, however, is becoming a delicate practice, especially since I am only here for a semester.

Mainland Europe is merely hours away and beckons a visit almost every weekend. For the present, though, I am letting my mind do the traveling through books. I am glad I listened to the woman in chapel, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity I have been given.

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