/lit/ - Literature

Question for non-Oxbridge posters: why bother?

>>17941953
Got an offer from Oxford for Master, looking forward to start. Currently reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad which contains some excellent use of narrative sequence.

>>17941967
Well fuck you too

>>17941953
Is college four years in the UK like it is in the US?

>>17942000
Normally 3, but you can add a year of work or study abroad

>>17942000
Undergraduate is 4 years? Why’s that? In my country its 3, but a masters degree is always 2 years too, unlike in Britain etc.

>>17942000
Normally 3 years for undergrad, but 4 if you study in Scotland or do a sandwich placement. And masters are 9-12 months.

>>17942008
In the US they make you take a bunch of requirement courses unrelated to your major.

Questions for Oxbridge posters who eventually taken their undergraduate, masters and Dphil there. How in the world did you afford it?

>>17942024
Doesn't the government pay for education in Europe?

>>17942024
Tbf the govt loan will cover undergrad at Oxbridge, masters and doctoral you have to find the majority of the funding yourself.

I've been reading all these recent Oxbridge topics, along with that Oxford copypasta, with some bemusement. I went to Oxford and did a PPE degree. I have also read a lot of bitter posts about poshness but I did see a grain of truth: that the public school upbringing shielded you from feeling offence. It's true. It's always jarring when I come across a /lit/ type in real life, one of those fiercely attempting to climb the class ladder through erudition and intellect alone. It is embarrassing on both sides.

On the one hand, this person, so used to being the towering intellect in their Durham-LSE-UCL (oh spare me about English Literature rankings!)-Warwick social circle (Bristol, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews seem to produce only jolly clowns, not these types), is visibly mortified while realising how much the Oxbridge natural brilliance shines through. What's funny is that they are invariably better read than me. Tolstoy's lesser known works and so on. But they are still visibly insecure, in many cases shaking. Sometimes I use my 3-to-1 tutorial hewn bullshitting technique to pretend that I have read as much as them but I always reveal that I am joking and this terrifies them, as if realising I have been boxing with both hands behind my back. Please, you guys, DON'T come across so try hard.

I now float in and out of fashionable South Kensington, Russel Square, and, when I feel like knobbing that hipsterish girl you cooed over in your 30 person English tutorials as a Chinese teaching assistant failed to draw ANY original thoughts from the class, Camden mileus on these autumnal and winter Friday and Saturday nights. It's quite funny really, my friends and I were academically brilliant, on many occasions being invited for individual wine sessions with multiple tutors from Economics, Law, and English Literature, and being begged to continue on with further study- on one occasion my tutor postponed his meeting with the Presidents of the World Bank and IMF where he would advise them of the Venezuela situation, in order to plead with me to develop a Hegelian line of attack on the similarities of English common law and Constantinople law that I had mentioned in a throwaway comment- and yet, in these fashionable parties, the most easily brilliant and witty people were the Oxbridge colleagues among us who had done so academically badly. Lowly Atillas, lazy Desmonds, narcoleptic Douglases: who knew they were so brilliant? But I guess that's Oxbridge for you!

>>17942062
this is excellent, saved

>>17942044
Common myth

>>17941953
I hate these threads. It just makes me even more pissed that I'm going to shit uni despite all my efforts

>>17942151
>he actually cares about his education

>>17942151
What uni? Mine's probably worse than yours

>>17942151
Which one, anon? Its probably decent enough

>>17942151
Chin up anon there’s always masters

>>17942165
>>17942186
I applied late because I was debating whether going was a good idea at all because lock down just started. University of Swansea was one of the only places with an opening. I fucking hate it

>>17942207
If it's any consolation, I'm thinking about there for my masters - though I will admit it's my least preferential choice (even below Kent)

>>17942207
either drop out now if you're first year instead of suffering another 2 (3?) years, or just finish with a first and do a good PG

>>17942000
>uk
The uk is 4 countries.

>>17942213
Don't dude. The campus is the ugliest shit ever and the noise is unbearable. I'm not the partying type but things faggots just stand in front of the accommodation and yell just for the sake of waking people up at 4am. The fire alarm goes off constantly and I think it gave me tinnitus. I'm at home right now and the emails I've gotten is about people finding meth on my floor and other shit like broken doors. I can't speak for the teaching because I haven't learnt a single thing because it's all online lectures.
>>17942216
What else would I do though? I've been thinking about transferring for my second year to Royal Holloway but I don't know if they're still accepting those kind of things at April. I feel like I don't have a choice but to flush my life down this toilet.
>or just finish with a first and do a good PG
That was A plan I had but I'm sucking shit. I feel like I'm getting stupider—I wasn't prepared for this completely unstructured learning environment as my whole school career involved me overcoming my ADHD by using the structure a classroom provides to learn.

>>17942273
>I'm not the partying type but things faggots just stand in front of the accommodation and yell just for the sake of waking people up at 4am. The fire alarm goes off constantly and I think it gave me tinnitus
Dude that's first year at most unis, I had to deal with that shit, which is why I moved further out for the next 3 years.
>>17942273
>I can't speak for the teaching because I haven't learnt a single thing because it's all online lectures.
That's just uni tbqh. 95% of the learning you do it self-directed ime, and comes from your own reading.

I'm probably not the best comparison tho, bc I literally attended fewer than 30 lectures over a 4 year period bc they were pointless and spent my time learning on my own in my accommodation. And tbf I got a high 2:1, but ye, uni is a complete scam for the most part. The sooner you realise, the sooner you can adjust yourself to rise above it.

>>17942273
doesn't look too bad

>>17942318
>stock image

Anyone got any tips for getting into a good study routine? I'm very stressed about how much work I have and the exams I need to learn the course material for but I still piss away too much time on websites like this one and other semi-useless pursuits.

>>17942362
I would just try and push back all your non-curricular activities to after 7pm, and then allow yourself as much as you want past then. That way you can still overindulge, but before then you have to be productive in order to 'earn' your shitposting time.

Just one essay, one exam, and the rest of my diss left and it's comfy postgrad life I come bros

>>17941953
Where is the pic from?

>>17942602
University of Aberdeen says Google

>>17942602
>>17942621
It's the Meston building of Aberdeen uni taken from the top of the library

>>17941967
Push rock up hill, be happy. dont matter where hill is. only push rock

Last nights thread was way more active

Talked to some UK-bros yesterday and they said with the corona situation being handled much better in the UK that in July things are planned to return to normal again already.
Have you guys heard about this?
I assume you also dont know anything yet about whether your unis will be offline again yet sometime soon perhaps either?
I am considering delaying my Masters by 1 year to avoid wasting an uncertain amount of it for online class work.

>>17943753
things will probably be more or less normal by the autumn, I would not delay your masters

>>17943753
tfw I returned to school just in time for full clown world, sitting in front of a laptop and not even being allowed into the library.

>>17943770
No they wont, I wouldnt put it past especially Europoor countries to go through with this another two semesters.

>>17943770
For you gyus perhaps.
Im in Germany. we have elections coming up and government talks last time went into the next year. I wont missout on a whole semester considering I will also spend one abroad it would be only a year at the uni proper. And this is considering all goes well.

>>17941953
I used to be embarrassed about not having gone to university. Now I'm in my 20s running my own business and get many applicants from so-called elite universities applying for 18k/year positions within my company. In interviews they still have this smug air of superiority about them while they're trying to explain how their BA from Oxford is going to help them bookkeep for me. I always end up hiring some kid straight out of school or a person with actual experience instead. Your degree is a mark against you and I know many other employers that feel exactly the same.

>>17943753
Do it. I could not imagine going to Uni right now. It must be absolutely miserable.

Has anyone founded/been a member of any decent literature societies at their uni?

>>17943753
I've spoken to a few PhD students who are seminar tutors in the last couple weeks. Apparently they are prepping for blended learning as a precaution, but the current expectation is that teaching and seminars will be in-person.

I wouldn't blame anyone taking a year out, but I'm already in my mid-20s and don't want to delay my masters any further.

>>17942213
What's wrong with Kent, I was thinking of going there?

>>17944443
not him but Kent is bleeding cash right now. They pumped like £75 million into European campuses and invested in being "the UK's European university" and then Brexit happened and they've been making cuts and laying people off left right and centre. I think it's had a pretty sizable drop in prestige the last few years or so.

>>17944443
It's not a very good uni unless you want to do STEM/biology, but bc they're lenient in what they let their professors do research on, they're quite good if you want to research is unorthodox. But ye it's also had a large drop in prestige recently.

Any tips for EU nationals who got into Oxbridge (Cambridge, in my case) for masters, and cannot afford the tuition? With Brexit now effective, most of the previously viable options such as UK student loan are no longer available

>>17944614
are you seriously asking this now? Oxbridge has extremely generous funding and scholarships for masters' students (most other unis you're more or less on your own or have to resort to private bank loans on top of student finance) but they close in January.

Assuming you have actually been accepted and aren't doing a poor LARP, you've prepared for this extremely poorly. I suppose your best course of action is to ask to defer to next year but I don't think admissions will be particularly enthused.

>>17944654
Of course I did apply for the Gates Cambridge scholarship and the Cambridge trust scholarships, but I didn't get the Gates Cambridge and I am still waiting for the Cambridge trust ones. I was just wondering if there are some lesser-known alternatives I might not be familiar with.

I'm in my first year at Oxford (undergrad). If anyone one on /lit/ is also at Oxford, it would be good to meet up.

>>17944716
Which college are you in? Are you on campus atm or studying from home?

>>17944848
Magdalen
I'm at home right now for the vac, but I'll return to college for Trinity, in either 0th or 1st week
If you're also at Oxford, email me at: litoxfordburner@gmail.com

Barts and the London Medical school gang
Alumni ranging from the founder of circulation William Harvey to the founder of Al-Muhajiroon, Anjem Choudhary

>>17944614
I actually have the same problem. I did apply for some scholarships but I doubt I'll be getting any. So loans for me.

speaking of scholarships, is it too late to apply for most of them now?

Is it too late to ring up unis to ask to transfer there for my second year?

>>17941953
american who will be going to LSE for a year, what am i in for

>>17945326
Undergraduate or graduate?

>>17945326
apparently it has the highest suicide rate of all uk universities

>>17945345
seriously

>>17945333
undergraduate for political science. would like to take a lot of economic history courses there since my home institution is tiny and doesn't have interdisciplinary stuff
>>17945345
is the social scene there that bad or is it the workload?

Based ex-poly students where are you? Mech eng

>>17945367
should be pretty good but work intensive. Its a very good international uni.

>>17945367
I don't really know, it's just a fact I heard when I was applying to unis in sixth form. The impression I got was that there's a lot of unhappy foreign students (like Asians and that) who are paying a lot of money and have huge family pressure to not fail.

Any engineering students here; what have you done for your final year project

>>17945420
Not really an engineering student but a CS student but whatever next year I am probably gonna implement some Bayesian Phylogenetic algorithms and apply them to linguistic datasets (probably PIE).

>>17945405
that's fair, when i visited MIT's campus, a student guide said that it has one of the highest suicide rates in the US but nothing at that school struck me as explicitly depressing in terms of its social aspects. i guess the workload can be intense, but i imagine that most people that go there are enthusiastic about learning. i feel like LSE is probably similar

>>17945438
No doubt it's a great University. Probably not the best place to go if you want the true bong experience of getting pissed on cheap pints in a beer garden with your mates but a degree from there commands a lot of respect (no matter what Humphrey Appleby says!).

>>17945326
>>17945438
LSE has the added stress of living in the middle of one of the biggest cities on the planet, which obviously won't be to everyone's taste. Nonetheless, I hope you make the most of it and enjoy your time there. Have you planned on exploring the UK? I'd say it's essential not to let London dictate your opinion of Britain in general.

>>17945446
i'll be there for just a year for their general course. the college i go to in the US is fairly small and not well known outside of yuppie academia circles. everyone here is basically expected to go onto graduate school or get a PhD in some obscure subject, so it'll be nice to take more practical/pre-professional courses
>>17945454
thanks, ive spoken to a friend who is in graduate studies and did a year in undergraduate abroad at oxford and he basically spent 5/7 days of the week exploring london and oxford, so hopefully i'll get the chance to get off campus

>>17945514
ah calm, reckon you'll have a decent time then, I just echo what the other guy says though make sure to get out of London when you can. There's loads of amazing places that you can visit in a day's train ride. Oxford and Cambridge are the obvious ones but there's many others. Depends what you're interested in really but I'd definitely recommend getting out into the countryside. The english countryside is among the most pleasant places in the world and was the muse of a myriad great writers from Orwell to Tolkein to Chaucer.

>>17945571
that's good advice. i'm a little worried since my home institution is known for having a lot of atomized and introverted students, and the LSE experience seemed pretty similar to that. students from my school who had gone abroad there said that i shouldn't expect it to be a year off or something you can coast through. the friend from oxford said that since his only assignments were essays for the weekly tutorial meetings, he'd basically only have 1 day of classes, one day of writing the essay, and then spend the rest of the week doing whatever he wanted. i imagine that LSE is more structured than that

>>17945625
Oxbridge humanities are pretty famous for their laid back approach. An essay a week, a tutorial a week, the rest of the time spent chatting up art hoes on punts. That's not the case for any STEM course at Oxbridge and it almost certainly won't be the case at LSE either. London is a pretty atomised city desu so you will probably have to try a bit harder to have a decent social life than you might in Oxbridge but it can definitely be done.

If you really want to have a good time in England I suggest a good backpack, fifty quid in your back pocket, and a train ticket to the norf.

>>17945657
Two 2000 word essays a week is not laid back.

>>17945711
I thought it was only one? If it is two that is quite hard work in fairness.

Any grads here? Where do you work now

>>17945772
PhD

>>17945723
>>17945711
it was one essay a week, for the art history department

>>17945804
Did you like art history? What are you doing now?

>>17945890
the art history major was a friend. he currently does graduate studies at cambridge in art history and a lot of independent research. for me personally, i'd like to go into economic history for graduate school. i did take art history in my freshman year and i did find it interesting, even if it's a field known for its impracticality

>>17945967
Nice

Have anyone here done an MSt or MPhil in history at Oxford? Any thoughts or recs?

Why are Anglos so scheming? These threads disturb me

>>17947075
what?

>>17947075
We could save the universe and you ESL would still seethe at us. Give it a rest

As an economics student, I do barely any work and considerably much less work than those in other degrees. I occasionally do the essential reading, but even then it's only like one academic paper or a chapter of a book. I watch the lectures obviously, do the questions they set us, but sometimes I just peek at the answers if I dont work it out within 5 seconds. The maths is ridiculously easy considering I did Maths and Further Maths A-Level, and I am taking all the most rigorous maths and stats courses they offer. I never write essays unless they are the assessed deadline essays. I'm lazy as fuck, but im still on 84% average after 1.5 years now, and my lowest grade overall is 70%, and that was because they never explained how to write essays until now. Seems like humanities and arts fags do way more work

>>17947153
which uni?

>>17947255
York. My supervisor even told me that our degree is one of the more mathematically rigorous ones in the UK. I'm not saying im super smart, im a simple man and a bit retarded. But I think economics is easy if you can do maths to a reasonable level but also understand the models on a conceptual level. Most of what I have done in this degree is learn about mathematical models for the economy and compare them with empirical reality through econometric and statistical analysis of data. There was also an economic history course where i had to read a few books but those can usually just be summarised into a few key points and topics. I'm actually annoyed about the online exams this year because it gave the professors the excuse to make the exam questions much harder than they would usually be

>>17947310
I usually prefer the online exams, but that's just me.

>>17941953
Reminder that you are just being used to prop the economy in the shitty little towns where most unis tend to be:
https://unherd.com/2019/12/who-gains-from-the-great-university-scam

But hey, at least you get a good boy certificate, too bad there are more of those certificates than jobs available. Hopefully it says Oxford, Cambridge or UCL on it.

>>17947447
Good luck trying to get a decent job without a uni degree, retard

>>17947453
Good luck trying to get a job, unicuck :^)

>>17947530
I don't need luck, I have an English degree from the university of Swansea B^)

>>17947530
Economics grads are extremely employable and one of the highest paid

>>17947547
Don't be so hard on yourself, anon. Swansea is surely not the worst place.

Okay bros I’m about to go to uni this sept and I’m thinking of doing CS. I’m planning on joining the army so I can make them pay my loans and is that a good idea? Also to any CS fags here want to tell me how it’s like to do the subject?

>>17941953
>imagine studying in britain
>imagine paying for uni
>imagine being an Anglo
>imagine not finding a job

>>imagine still being smug about it

lol

>>17947753
If my parents weren't prepared to subsidise my tuition (I got lucky), I would join the army before going to uni. Make sure you read Starship Troopers before signing up