Bennett Pienkowski

It seems wise to be critical, or at least aware, of the social, intellectual, and even physical ‘bubbles’ that we build in our lives. That being said, my time at CMRS in Oxford has helped me to appreciate the other side of this proverbial coin. Bubbles can also allow for otherwise impossible experiences and educational opportunities.

Oxford is a city and a university filled with professional academics and brilliant students all deeply committed to every possible field of study. Most mornings, afternoons, and evenings offer the chance to attend lectures by some of the world’s most influential thinkers, business leaders, and politicians. In terms of pedagogy, Oxford’s hallmark is the tutorial system whereby students engage with instructors in weekly one-on-one meetings. It’s hard to imagine just how stimulating, difficult, and rewarding this class-structure is. The first time one of your essays is analytically torn to shreds, it is incredibly jarring, but when you come to realize just how effective the experience was at helping you to uncover the flaws in your thought processes and argumentation, you don’t want education to take any other form.

Middlebury’s CMRS program is entirely devoted to the humanities, located in a quirky building at the very heart of the city-center, and staffed by professionals well-versed not only in their respective fields but in the precarious art of British wit. You spend a lot of time with your fellow CMRS students, certainly more of a blessing than a curse, and you have access to an in-house library that contains the most essential volumes of early western literature and theory. The culture of CMRS is nicely captured by the image of students checking out Machiavelli or The Song of Roland while bleary-eyed and still in their pajamas, an amusingly frequent occurrence.

There are plenty of distinguishing aspects of the place that have gone unmentioned: the architecture, the ubiquitous attention to history, the unparalleled Bodleian library system, to name just a few. Even so, I think it is fair to say that Oxford and CMRS are indeed bubbles. I would encourage anyone to go and find out just what formative, engaging, and ultimately indispensable places bubbles can be.