Malin v. the Tutorial System, Round Three

You would think that, after having survived it twice already, re-acclimating to the Oxford academic cycle would be something approaching a cinch. The thing is — it might have, had a certain volcano not disrupted European air travel for a week and prevented me from getting back a week before term was due to start. The week, I set aside for the purposes of attempting to get a solid start on work. Getting back to Oxford late has put me in more of an academic bind than I realised it might: I had an essay due today, two three hour-long collections — shorthand for these very useless practise exams given at the start of every term on the previous term’s tutorials — to make up this weekend, one essay due Tuesday for which I’ve only started the reading, one essay to prepare due Wednesday for which I’ve not yet thought about the writing, and a set of quantitative exercises due Wednesday as well. In the midst of all this, I will have to miss May Morning celebrations at Oxford, something that saddens me immensely, and I am not getting much sleep.

Last night, I was finishing up reading for the essay due today for my Comparative Demographic Systems tutorial that was only assigned two days ago. Having never studied demography before, it was completely unfamiliar intellectual terrain for me. Unable to make much headway in the essay, I gave up at around 4:30am, set an alarm for four hours later, woke up, and tried to make it appear as competent as possible. For the first time in my time at Oxford, I left my essay — already badly written — conclusion-less; in my eyes, it was an incomplete essay. Needless to say, as I rushed over to my tutor’s office, I was rather terrified of what might happen in that hour with him. If, at Georgetown, I don’t do my readings before a seminar or recitation, I find ways of keeping my contributions to an absolute minimum, if I make any at all; I imagine this is a skill that all university students learn to master! At Oxford, when it is just me (and, sometimes, one or two other people) and a frighteningly educated fellow sitting opposite, I cannot count on the beneficence of my classmates to deliver me from my ignorance: I must respond to every question, whether I know the answer or not.

My demography tutor has been in the education business for a very long time. He has more than ninety publication to his name — so I read on his CV beforehand — and, as I stepped into his office and we formally made one another’s acquaintance, I realised that, in my last term here, I had on my hands a tutor made in the quintessential Oxford mold (of course, it is a testament to the high calibre of Oxford faculty that it does attract such a diversity of fellows). His knowledge was positively encyclopaedic, as he rattled off facts, numbers, and events in that effortless manner of all seasoned academics. He did not hesitate to quiz me on everything from pre-industrial marriage and household patterns in Western Europe — which, after all, was this week’s topic — to European geography and the religious history of the Baltic states, nor did he have any problem waiting when we awkwardly sat in silence as I attempted, and failed, to come up with answers for more than a few of his queries. At the risk of stereotyping somewhat, he was altogether very British: incredibly eloquent when he discussed the matter at hand, fond of amusing/informative & more or less relevant tangents, and unsparing in his deployment of irony and understatement. He did not waste words in telling me if I was wrong about something, but he was not insensitive to those moments — few and far between, mind! — during which I managed to say something correct and/or vaguely enlightened. When, for instance, I recalled that Sweden was a regional European power around the time of the Thirty Years’ War, a detail I dragged out of my AP European History memories, he looked at me with a very bemused smile and simply said, “You’re well informed.” And, when all was said and done, I turned in my essay, we chatted a bit more, he bid me a warm farewell, and I thought that he thought I had ultimately acquitted myself quite well, given the circumstances.

When I look back on my year at Oxford — and I am only eight weeks away from it ending — from an academic standpoint, two things will come to mind. First, I will remember feeling, on most days, just slightly overwhelmed. It is in the nature of the system, after all. During term, the concept of being on top of things simply doesn’t exist: as a student, I live from essay to essay, doing the readings I have to do for each one before frantically (or not so frantically, if I get distracted by the internet) writing them the night before they’re due. Tutorial, in all honesty, can occasionally be a legitimately terrifying experience: there are the long silences, the lack of sleep that precedes them, the bad essays, the comments from the tutor that clearly indicate he/she thought you wrote a bad essay, and so on. But, then, I will recall days like today, when I, completely out of my league, went toe to toe with an Oxford fellow and walked away knowing that I had managed to not look like a complete fool or perhaps even impressed him a little.

And, knowing that much, surely I am capable of surviving anything else that academia might deem fit to throw in my direction.