I have just spent the last 3 days here in England with my friend Mary. Important fact: As I write this I am sitting in our favourite Pub enjoying the greatest fish and chips ever made.
I had a fantastic time here in England. London is one of my favourite cities that I had been to. The food is amazing! I have had incredible food experiences everywhere I have been, but this seemed to take the cake. The city is amazing, there is stuff happening everywhere all the time. This morning I woke up accidentally at 5 am, and I couldn’t get to sleep for another hour, but it was the most amazing thing listening through my window as the city came alive during that time. Everyone was incredibly friendly, and just in three days we got to know the owner of our favourite local pub.
The highlight of our trip was the day trips to Oxford and Cambridge. Both Mary and I are considering school in the UK, and this experience completely sold me. Mary arranged for a professor in Physics to give us a tour of the labs at Oxford and I was amazed at the whole experience. We began with an hour and a half tour of the Clarendon labs, and then went to tea with the whole group, then we were given a tour of the university itself, and finally went to a pub with the professor and a few of the grad students. This was incredibly more than we expected and the whole experience really sold us one the idea of school here. To be honest, my first thought of Oxford is stuck up academics, but these were incredibly smart researchers who were also down to earth and funny, and after only a few hours I really felt like I had gotten to know these people.
Oxford is scattered all throughout the city, and there is no real ‘campus’ to speak of which means that the academic buildings are scattered with shops and restaurants and gives a great community feel. Oxford and Cambridge are built upon the college system, where you live and eat within a community of 200-1000, equipped with its own faculty, common rooms and other facilities. One of my biggest concerns about pursuing a PhD is that I will go off and only associate with Physics students, and lose touch with my poli sci, history or language interests. Here, however, the college system forces you to live and eat with people of every discipline. Also, any lecture is open to every student, so it would be possible for me to attend lectures that interested me no matter the subject.
Cambridge was much the same story. It has very similar attractive features to Cambridge, and we got a great tour from Zoe, one of Austin’s good friends who attends school here. Some of the differences that I found were that Oxford is in a city, with many people who do not work at the Uni, but the town of Cambridge is essentially all University, or people who provide services for the Uni. I will also have to look into what research areas I am interested in at each school before I choose a favorite, but this visit completely sold me on the College system, the schools themselves and the cities they are located in. And as if I could turn either one of them down anyway.
I didn’t take much pictures or video while I was there mostly because I would have felt like an uber tourist. However, here is a quick video to show you what the inside of a college looks like. They are walled off and then you have to get past a porter to get in, and it was even more difficult to get in because it was exams time as well. I may have snuck it while no one was looking.
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