Always the Adventure: Discovering a whole new world and culture that is “Only at Oxford”

Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.

It is impossible to condense my experiences studying aboard into a sentence or two, but if necessary, the phrase, “Only at Oxford” would be the most adequate. Only at Oxford do professors in bright pink jumpers lecture philosophy in front of elegant rose windows. Only at Oxford can you see women cycling down the street in high heels and pencil skirts. Only at Oxford would I have wanted to spend my semester abroad.

Going “up to Oxford”, even from nearby London, it is an entirely different world.  Even the setup of the university is odd.  Contrary to popular belief, there is no single University of Oxford. It is a constituency system, comprised of 38 independent colleges that function under the overall governance of the University.  Consider the U.S., replacing states with colleges and the federal government with the University.

My assigned college was St. Anne’s College. Reaching college status in 1952 as an all girls’ school, though it became co-ed in 1979, St. Anne’s is actually one of the newest Oxford colleges.  Today it is also one of the largest, with around 450 undergraduate students. St. Anne’s is not the stereotypical “Oxford College” like Christ Church or All Souls. It trades in beautiful spires for brutalist concrete buildings, and famous alumni for eccentric faculty, but for what it lacks in prestige, it makes up for with a progressive attitude, a welcoming attitude to international students, and the largest college library.  Most importantly, it became my home for four months.

The constituency setup makes Oxford uniquely a town within a university rather than the typical reverse. Everything is tailored to students. While the non-academic residents resent this, a tension that once actually resulted in riots in 1355, this scholastic bubble is remarkably welcoming to students, especially for one from across the pond. Since America as a nation is vastly younger than practically the whole of Oxford, everything about it, from its antiquated cobblestone streets to the gargoyles watching you on every corner, was utterly enchanting.  

At the same time, this isolation made for a challenging double culture shock. Not only was I going to a strange land where fries are chips and chips and crisps, but I was diving even deeper, into the most stubbornly traditional place in an already fiercely traditional country. As I learned how to be British to avoid derisive torment just because I said pants instead of trousers, I was also learning things specific to Oxford itself: what words like “bop” and “soc” meant, the rules and strange lingo surrounding the popular Oxford sport of rowing, and how to punt without allowing the pole to get stuck in the mud. Punting, or using a long metal pole to push flat wooden boats down the river, is a quintessential Oxford pastime, and trust me, it is not as easy as it looks.

In Hilary term, I faced a huge learning curve, but by Trinity, I had finally settled and immersed myself into the inner workings of my surreal surrounding. I celebrated May Day, the first day of May, by traditionally staying awake all night and congregating with masses of other exhausted students at Magdalen Bridge to hear the choir sing out at 6 a.m. I spent Friday night at fancy formal dinners and raced around in bumper cars in a floor length gown at the St. Hugh’s College ball. I went clubbing on Wednesdays and celebrated finishing weekly essays with a pint of cider in one of the many pubs.  My favorite of these was The Eagle and Child, where I could sit around the very table once frequented by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, just below a map of Middle Earth, beside a door labeled “Narnia”. Only at Oxford.