Category: Oxford

Posts about living and studying in Oxford, the Oxford system, etc

Welcomed back to England by illness

My theory is that for much of my later time at home, I was suppressing the fact that I was actually somewhat ill. It’s like how Jack Bauer can suppress the need to sleep or charge his cellular phone while he is on the job. Either that, or I was induced to become ill by the long journey and jet lag. As such, I have spent most of today in bed trying to catch up on reading. Now, I am being forced out by the complete lack of food in my house.

On the plus side, the internet connection in my flat seems to have grown back. It was probably a case of scheduled maintenance that I never learned about because I am not a St. Antony’s student.

Incommunicado

I have returned home to find my internet connection at home completely disabled, the landline in our flat being strange and particular about who it will call, and my mailbox in Wadham College re-assigned, with my large pile of post dumped in a box with that of all the other people who have suffered the same undignified treatment. Wadham College has even disabled my access to the network in our Middle Common Room. I feel rather like Bilbo Baggins returning home from a long voyage to find his relatives auctioning off his possessions.

With luck, I should be back up and running by tomorrow. I certainly have a great deal to do.

PhD discussions

Meghan Mathieson

Having just had to walk home from downtown – across the Lions Gate Bridge – after missing the last bus, I am not in the mood to write a great deal. As such, the great bulk of today’s happenings will go undocumented.

Perhaps the most distinct thing to arise from my conversations with former profs at UBC is the need to cultivate an additional pair of references at Oxford, aside from Andrew Hurrell. According to advice from Peter Dauvergne, using references from my first degree would be viewed with suspicion in an application to doctoral programs. I don’t really think anyone aside from Dr. Hurrell is familiar enough with my first year of work to serve as a reference, so I will need to make sure that whoever teaches my optional subjects next year gets to know me and my work well enough to do so. Apparently, name recognition relating to a letter from someone like Henry Shue could be a big advantage for US schools – perhaps enough to make me reconsider the choice to take international law and the developing world as options, while he is teaching his reading-intensive version of normative theory.

Both Kathy Baylis and Peter Dauvergne strongly endorsed MIT, Columbia, and Berkeley for a doctorate, on the basis of my interests. As such, and on the basis of much prior contemplation, that trio constitutes my set of top choices at the moment.

The need to have {a solid proposal} and {excellent references} and {very good grades} and {a solid score on the GRE} and {a plausible supervisor at the school to which you apply} is collectively a daunting set of requirements. Indeed, I left my meeting with Dr. Dauvergne feeling quite menaced by the whole process.

Tertiary degree contemplation

Hotel Vancouver

Sitting in the Cafe Deux Soleils on Commercial is an interesting demonstration of how this is increasingly the part of town that makes the most sense to me. That was emerging strongly during my last few months in Vancouver, as more and more of my friends moved out here from the cocoon that is UBC and environs.

Being home has provoked a lot of thought and discussion about potential doctoral studies. Setting aside the question – addressed earlier – of whether to take a pause between M.Phil and PhD and what to do in it, the matter of where to do the latter degree remains. One option is to try and get into the D.Phil program at Oxford. I don’t know how many spaces there are, but it seems like many members of the M.Phil program are hoping to get one. The biggest advantage of doing so is the rapidity with which I would get the degree. To go from an M.Phil to a PhD in just two years almost feels like cheating, but such is the nature of the accelerated Oxford system. Paying for two more years at Oxford international student prices is pretty daunting, plus there simply must be a limited amount of learning and experience that you can acquire in just two years.

Another possibility, which I am considering most seriously, is to do a doctorate in the United States. Advantages are that good American schools apparently fund their doctoral students at a level sufficient to pay for school and remain alive and reasonably happy. That is pretty necessary, given that such a program would take between four and six years to complete, depending on where you go and how similar your doctoral thesis ends up being to your master’s thesis. If it is basically just an extension, there is obviously less work involved, and thus less time.

Doing a degree in Canada is not something I have given a great deal of thought to. I don’t really know too much about Canadian doctoral programs, and most people I know in them are rather disillusioned at the moment. Of course, most of the doctoral students I know are in Oxford or Canada – the United States is a sometimes alluring mystery.

Advice from those with information on any of those possibilities would be appreciated. Hopefully, I will extract a bit from Kathy Baylis and Peter Dauvergne on Friday.

PS. With 1.2GB of RAM, the iBook feels positively zippy when dealing with the nearly 7000 image files now resident in iPhoto.

Baseless rivalries

Michael Ignatieff uses the phrase “the narcissism of minor difference” during his discussion of the violent collapse of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Whereas once Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats were able to identify themselves on the basis of all sorts of characteristics, beliefs and affiliations, Ignatieff argues that the deteriorating security system effectively stripped people down to a base identity established in race, thereby splitting communities, undermining trust, and pushing things farther along the road to violent upheaval.

The intentional amplification of trivial differences seems to be a particular human talent – like seeing faces in random patterns. Among the most absurd examples of this intentional polarization and flimsily-grounded vitriol is the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry. It boggles my mind that people could feel hostile towards the other school, or people from there, simply on the basis of the minor differences that exist. In organization, in history, in societal role – Oxford and Cambridge are essentially the same.

There are some who argue that such rivalries are a form of healthy competition and that they somehow drive people to excel. This is the school of thinking that led to the brutish conditions in so many boarding schools where children are encouraged to fend for themselves and, like the participants in the Stanford prison experiment, rapidly begin to brutalize one another. While rivalries of this kind do create competition, it is not a competition that fosters or encourages healthy outcomes.

And yet there are intelligent, normally right-thinking people who describe their fellows at the other institution in derogatory terms. I suspect that it is precisely that similarity that generates the impulse to defend one’s choice through an assertion of superiority. The criticism is always semi-joking, but that hardly exonerates tho who carry it out in my eyes. Saying in jest that you despise someone for an utterly insignificant reason is no credit to you as either a comic or a human being.

Leaving Oxford in 36 hours; reaching Vancouver in 53

My flight to Vancouver leaves Gatwick at 5:55am GMT on Wednesday, which is actually 9:55pm of Tuesday in Vancouver. Assigning three hours to the bus ride and three more to be sure of clearing security on time, I will be leaving Oxford – suitcases in tow – at midnight local time tomorrow. While that is setting up England-Tuesday / Canada-Wednesday to be a kind of uber-day, such is the character of the flight plan. I just hope that my brain is back on its bearings by the time we will be leaving for Tristan’s cabin on Friday morning.

Everything from now until Tuesday night is likely to be about consolidation. Packing, organizing, and otherwise preparing. The prospect of the forthcoming journey is an exciting one, indeed.

[Unrelated, but unfortunate] Steve Irwin, the self-styled ‘Crocodile Hunter,’ was killed by a stingray in Queensland today. He was frequently a model for characters generated by the Handsworth Improv Team, in which both of my brothers performed for years, and generally struck me as a decent sort of fellow. My sympathies to his family, friends, and two young children.

One more Oxford week

In less than a week, I will be in Vancouver. This astonishing thought has partially provoked the cascade of attempted task completion that my life should turn into between now and then. I have even been wandering around inside the insane labyrinth that is the OUSSG website. Frankly, I am scared of it. I have never seen so much machinery for doing so little. Far from being a cavernous mass of idle equipment, however, it seems more like a mechanical elephant trying to balance on a ball. If the beast manages it, everyone cheers. As the supposed ringmaster, you have better make sure not to do and prodding of either beast or ball, if you want to keep all upright.

Once I get my bike back tomorrow, many of these tasks should be sped up. I could have had it back today, but there were unresolved issues regarding the seat. I’ve finally decided to replace the one transferred from a derelict after the original was stolen with a proper one. Hopefully, this one will last the year without being stolen. Once you add up the seat, bits and bobs, and the cost of installation (I don’t have the tools) it ends up being more than $50.

Inventing a system for sorting printed materials related to the thesis is another project. I got a big plastic box and some hanging file folders. The current mixture of notebooks and loose documents in binders does not lead itself to the easy access of any one item. There is also a certain expectation bound up in the box, which remains nearly empty. With less than a year left, it is time to start the great bulk of the task in earnest.

Timeline for Oxford withdrawal?

Another situation that certain strategic planners would understand well relates to the Vancouver trip. One the one hand, I could use this opportunity to ship over either things that I already own in Vancouver and have wanted all year (like my 50mm f/1.8 lens) or newly purchased items of a necessary sort. The trouble with this is that I have no viable exit strategy for even the items I already have here. I lack the strategic lift capability to shift back items accumulated here: especially books. While dishes and other necessities of life can be sold or given to friends who are staying on, books and papers are the kind of thing that I should bring back with me – especially if I am to subsequently do a PhD in a related area.

The other option, then, is to begin the process of re-locating back to Vancouver. I could use any extra space in my luggage to start bringing back things that I do not really need but want to keep (like books that have already been read, or hard copies of photos). A complicating factor is uncertainty about whether I will even be in Vancouver for a substantial period of time during the next half decade or so. It could just be a case of touching base there before heading outwards again: to work, travel, or go to school.

A bit on Oxford’s canals

Bridge over the Oxford Canal

Oxford’s canal system is one of the more interesting parts of the county to explore. They certainly look as though they harken from a departed era of red brick and steam powered industry. Nonetheless, they have a good modern role as walking paths, cycling routes, and waterways for the longboats that seem to form a curious sub-culture of British life. There are a great many of these artificial waterways, criss-crossing the countryside and sometimes meeting with the Isis, but I have only traveled the length of a few. I mean to learn more about the canals and the longboat culture before I leave here; can anyone recommend a book?

There is an ongoing controversy about one stretch of the Oxford Canal that is owned by a company called British Waterways. I really don’t know enough about it to comment, but I have seem some pretty bold statements spray-painted on the plywood with which the former boatyard has been fenced around.

As I mentioned before, the primary danger relating to the canals, if you are a cyclist, is the probability of kamikaze insects blinding you for long enough to send you careening over the edge. This has nearly happened to me quite a number of times. As when boating, this is a case where the wise wear sunglasses.

PS. Despite being in Oxford all summer, I have yet to go punting. I hope once people from the program start returning en masse both the weather and the enthusiasm will be in place for a late summer bout.

On being a cyborg

Today’s bi-hourly deluges precipitated the purchase of an umbrella: not for my own sake, but on account of the constellation of electronic gadgets that now follow me about as I walk a broken bicycle to Cowley, or carry groceries back from Sainsbury’s to Church Walk.

There is a lot of talk these days about combining all the gizmos a person is likely to carry around into one all-purpose device. Sometimes, people term this amalgamation an ‘iPod killer.’ Personally, I don’t think it will ever fly, except with the nerdiest of the nerds. As it stands, there is a very solid chance that at least one among my digital camera, music player, or mobile phone will be broken at any particular time. If I had to mail all three to Stoke-on-Trent for three weeks every time one failed, I would soon be living a quiet and pictureless life.

Moreover, all three devices are designed to become obsolete as quickly as possible. Or, at least obsolete enough to make you buy a snazzier new model. Given that the development cycles in telephones, cameras, and music players are unlikely to sync up, you are assured of either having at least one device well behind the times, or being bankrupted by the need to constantly upgrade your all-singing whatsit.

Really, I do my mobile phone an injustice in lumping it together with the sometimes problematic camera and perpetually fault-prone iPod. Since Claire gave it to me, I haven’t had the slightest difficulty with it. Some might consider it a staid sort of item, with capabilities that do not extend beyond sending text messages and making the very occasional telephone call, but perhaps therein lies the secret of its durability. In contrast to my Palm Pilot – which is languishing in a box in Vancouver, bedeviled by problems of all varieties – my Moleskine paper-based day planner has performed flawlessly since purchased.