Studentia*

I've always liked school, and the whole idea of being a student.

It's a pretty good gig really, especially the whole college thing, where unlike French high school you don't have 7-8 hours of classes a day plus homework.

Nope: for my past five quarters at SPU I had tuesdays and thursdays off, and here at Oxford pretty much everyday I have to make heart-wrenching decisions like 'do i really feel like attending a lecture today?' (let's just say I've only answered that question positively about 11 times in the past 6 weeks).

And while I really enjoy my tutorials (and some lectures), the problem is that I'm only a student:

I wake up. I read. I write. I go to bed.

Part of it is attractive, but it just gets old after a while.

And I think that's one of the more important realizations I've had while I've been here. I used to think that I wanted to be a professor because then I could write and research, not so much because I could teach and interact with students. But I think that were my life not balanced, if I only took classes in graduate school or I only researched and wrote articles as a professor, I would end up unfulfilled.

I need people. I need interaction. I need more than scholarly debates that, while interesting, for the most part seem nit-picky and irrelevant. I need something outside myself and outside the covers of rarely read books.

This is part of the reason I'm excited to go back to SPU, where I am not just a student. I wouldn't say I'm super involved at SPU, but things like work, History Club, Debate, and (starting next quarter) Young Life give me areas to direct my energy. Here all of that energy just seems to leak into my papers.

That isn't to say that I'm unhappy here. To the contrary. I love my friends. I love the experience and the rigo(u)r. I love Hugh, my tutor. I love England (minus the pricey Pound, the mediocre beer, and London). But I think that if I were to stay here the whole year I would indeed become unhappy.

So I'm glad I have three weeks left, both because I don't think I'll be completely burnt out by then, and it gives me three more weekends to explore with friends (Edinburgh tomorrow), explore Oxford, and enjoy the unstructured, somewhat surreal, nature of life here.



*I would like to thank Alex Hardy for sparking this post while watching the Avs with me at the Royal Blenheim.