The First Couple Weeks

It’s certainly been a busy couple of weeks. I had intended to post earlier, honestly, but unfortunately circumstances conspired to fill the time I had budgeted for writing to be filled with numerous events and a great deal of schoolwork. On the positive side though, this has given me a great deal to write about over the next several days, so let’s get right to it.

I suppose to start I ought to give some description of where I actually am and how I got here. Well, way back at the start of October, my father and I flew over from Chicago to London to spend the week touring around and preparing to move me into Jesus College at Oxford.

The Front Entrance of Jesus, as seen from within

After arriving in Oxford, my dad and I trekked down to the center of the city with suitcases in tow in order to begin moving my stuff to where I'd be studying for the next three years. Now I had been assigned a room in the infamous "Staircase 18" of Jesus College, where many of my fellow freshers had stayed for their interviews.

On the left, the dreaded Staircase 18

However, upon arriving, I was very pleasantly surprised; apparently over the summer they had completely renovated the building, so my room actually now looks like this:

Not so dreadful. I even have a bathroom!

As eager as I was to start my course though, the week prior to the start of term was Freshers Week, an incredibly overwhelming period of meeting new people, learning new things, and nightly outings to various clubs and drinking establishments. Those of you who know me will have already correctly assumed that I did not participate in much of the last activity. Before too long though, it was time to actually start college and given the heavily abbreviated schedule of Oxford terms compared to American semesters, that meant a lot of work very quickly.

Apparently at the end of eight weeks, this will make sense

This term, I'm studying the Philosophy and Economics portions of my PPE (second P for Politics) course, which has so far entailed Logic, Moral Philosophy, Math, and Microeconomics. Once math class ends after a couple of weeks, my schedule will consist entirely of lectures with hundreds of students and tutorials with just two or three. In fact, I just had my first tutorial today, and without getting too much into it, I can say that it was a rather engaging academic experience.

But fortunately, my course has proven rather enjoyable thus far, and there's been a fair amount of time available for fun outside of classes. I've been exploring a lot of different clubs and societies - such as the Oxford Union, the Liberal Democrats, the Role-Playing Game Society, and the eSports Society - that will certainly be detailed further in later posts as my interests develop.

In other news, I've now matriculated both to Jesus College and Oxford University, which involved two separate ceremonies featuring dressing up and Latin. In fact, for the University matriculation, we had to wear academic dress, which for undergraduate men is essentially a suit with a cape-like thing.

The PPEists of Jesus College, Class of 2016.

I do hope to post more often in the future, so again, if anyone wants to see me write about anything in particular, just leave me a comment. Lastly, to conclude, I want to give a shout-out to my girlfriend, Rachel, for sending me this awesome picture of us in China.

Miss you, Rachel!