Middlebury College, Academic Year 2019-2020

A typical day starts with breakfast, quietly watching the sun rise between the various “dreaming spires.” After some beans on toast, I quickly make my way past no less than four colleges and a 300-year-old market (good for fancy chocolates and cheese) to the Bodleian Library, a repository of nearly every book published in English and a fair amount of students’ tears. A morning of reading Hegel ends in time for a quick lunch before rushing down High Street to Queen’s College (a personal favorite, architecturally) to discuss my latest essay with my tutor. 



There’s no way to generalize what a tutorial looks like but it’s always some mix of terror and exhilaration. Tutors tease the week’s lesson out of you through careful questioning. You place your ideas on the table and your tutor critiques here, encourages there, and helps you place them in a respectable academic context. A class fails or succeeds on your willingness to play with the ideas in your readings. Oftentimes, a tutorial leaves me drained which is more than enough of an excuse for a cup of tea or coffee at one of the countless, brilliant coffee shops. I’ll start my next paper while caffeinating.



Dinnertime in the CMRS common room is a mélange of varying culinary talents and overlapping conversations about medieval eschatology, Viking epics, literary theory, or God knows what else. Conversations will travel late into the night unless interrupted by a movie, a pub trip, or pure exhaustion.



This schedule is regularly broken by newspaper lay-ins, church breakfasts, parties, day trips across the country, formal dinners at Keble, and much else. From the city (consisting almost entirely of cafes, gardens, and bookstores), to the people (as friendly and encouraging as anyone I’ve met), Oxford is the perfect place to embrace your inner intellectual.