[Music] from the moment you get to oxford you sort of feel that this is a special place a unique place because the whole vibe of students coming from libraries going straight to uh nightclubs and going back to the library afterwards and this sort of i mean surrounding the surreal atmosphere that's in the city is kind of like draws you in from the first minute really [Music] hi my name is paul i'm a final year student here at oxford studying philosophy politics and economics and i'm originally fr
om germany because oxford has this weird structure of having eight weeks of term and then just a very long vacation everything happens in those eight weeks so i wouldn't say i have a typical day that i or a routine that i follow but i tend to be in the library by 9 a.m so i wake up it's 7 30 8 to get a coffee before okay and then spend basically the whole day until like 2 p.m in the library then i get my lunch usually in one of the small cafes around the libraries and then the afternoon is basic
ally back in the library or extracurriculars so you meet up in different coffee shops talk to people about their projects how things are working out on certain projects that you're doing together and have a bit of social time as well and then back to the library until usually about 10-ish quarter to ten [Music] i wanted to bring you guys to this spot because it's where i spend most of my time at oxford and definitely the best bit of my time in oxford the ratcliffe camera camera behind us which i
s officially a history faculty library but it's part of the bigger network of the bodleian library which is oxford central library and it's definitely the space i spent the most time reading books freaking out about essays that i had to hand in the next morning and meeting friends so definitely this was the spot i enjoyed most in my time i might be a bit of a sort of super academic whatever really boring person but what i really enjoyed most was having a stack of books and a lot of time and know
ing i would have to write something about this make up my own mind about this it's kind of daunting because you see all these big names and you're a bit intimidated by the whole situation but knowing that you can do it and that you you can actually say something interesting about this was the greatest experience my third year i started taking a paper on aristotle's nike machine ethics and discovered that the tutor was actually a name that i've i've read a hundred times on my uh reading lists for
plato and other papers and he happened to be one of the biggest persons in ancient philosophy dominic scott and it was at first intimidating to write papers and know he's going to read them properly and he did read them very rigorously and made comments about my grammar a lot of them and it was very scary at first but i really started to love that paper and love that course because i really felt like i was taken serious by someone who's extremely well known on the field and who's extremely capa
ble who's now really interested in what i'm saying and um yeah it's a scary experience but it's also great to know that you've really done something worthwhile once you get out of your tutorial the tutorial situation that you have one professor and one student in a room discussing one topic for a whole hour is something that's completely unique i think to oxford and cambridge maybe having studied ppe here for three years i think what it's really about is on the one hand the sort of the theoretic
al rigorous knowledge that you learn throughout the course but also the sort of practical the histories of conflicts or the histories of current affairs alongside that i've also been doing a journal called the journal of interrupted studies which i started with my good friend in house mate mark barclay which basically tries to publish articles by academics at risk refugee academics who had to leave their home their countries because of war because of climate change for various reasons and who wa
nt to continue publishing their work because that's what they do for a living but can't finish articles and what we do is we try and publish them and thereby create a platform for these academics to a highlight the potential they have the academic integrity the the the knowledge that's actually coming to europe as well throughout the migration crisis but also to highlight on the other side that a lot of these academics cannot continue their work because of legal restrictions or because universit
ies are quite slow in integrating them and that project has been very important for me personally because it's more than just a sort of academic interest it's actually meeting people who suffered and who are now finding a new perspective to the world mark and i developed the journal in all the small little coffee shops around oxford and the missing bean was definitely the place we kept on coming back to and the place we actually started the journal de facto having the oxford name on the cover of
the journal definitely helped us a lot with the project because it meant that people who found out about the project took it to be much more credible than they would have probably taken a standard undergraduate journal and that definitely helped it also meant for mark and i that we wouldn't have started the journal i guess without the support of oxford university in the first place [Music] i came to oxford thinking that it'd be super academic and there wouldn't be much social life going on but
actually discovered that it's basically i mean a huge part of the oxford life every college has its own jcr and college bar attached which means you get subsidised drinks which is great because oxford is insanely expensive and the other thing is the jcr is a spot to just hang out and meet people from the undergrad community undergraduate community so it's just great because you get to chat to people and like talk about life at uni and there are no senior tutors around so it's kind of very intima
te but everything social sort of starts within the college means that social life is completely different here than it is back home where you know people from maybe school or neighborhoods so that makes oxford's social life completely different but at the same time if you're in a very small college like me you tend to be out much quicker so you leave the nest much more and again it depends on which college you're at after you finish your last exam once you're done with your degree basically you
walk out of examination schools in your whole like sub fast black tie outfit a white tie actually and you're trashed which means people throw everything they can find at you basically from a shaving from to confetti to i mean obscene things like food and anything so you're just completely trashed and in a disgusting state but then you jump into the river and it all kind of like disappears in your back sort of normal life out of the uni experience um and then just you have two weeks or three week
s remaining at oxford in which loads of crazy things happen go hunting driving around on boats on on the on the river you go to sports concerts you go clubbing and you go to balls white thai balls but um yeah so that's going to happen today for me and that's how i'm going to end my time at oxford tie means you have to wear a tail coat which looks like a penguin at first but then you've got to wear a waistcoat as well and where the name comes from a white tie so this one's one that i have to tie
up which will take me a good half now if i do it properly these flowers are called carnations it's a tradition at oxford that you wear them to your exams so you wear the white one on your first day of exams and the red one on the last day of exams but i just think they look quite cool on a white tie outfit so i'm just gonna put one here and see how it works tonight at the ball i've never been to a white tiger before so i'm not really sure what to expect but i just hope i can meet people for the
last time and say goodbye to a lot of people but also sort of leave oxford on a high note on feeling like yeah this was a great time and this is how i want to conclude [Music] i hope you enjoyed this video but if you want to find out more about the top universities of the world subscribe to crimson education
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