[satirical rant] An Oxford student survival guide

​Anyone unlucky enough to be around me through the last 6 years will know that a profound (erm) dissatisfaction with the Oxford University student experience is my worst-kept secret. My collection of frustrating anecdotes has hit critical mass and spilled over into a satirical student survival guide. It is bound to offend, so wear your thickest skin.

To view the guide, click Read More in the bottom right.

​Welcome to Oxford.

You will find that, much like the irrevocably entrenched class system and the fossilised academics still teaching 19th century phrenology, the infrastructure remains a time capsule of days long dead. Your room in the retrofitted Elizabethan mansion has no air-conditioning, your windows no glazing, and your sink boasts double the expected number of faucets. Neither deliver drinkable water of course, as so even before the Tories began dumping sewage upstream, but the resulting hair loss will save you hundreds in haircuts. The grimy, mould-riddled bathrooms will infect you, the ill-conceived road layout will delay you, and the narrow, warped sidewalks will trip you; when the swelling crowds of gawking tourists haven't already overflowed you roadward and under-bus. "It's like living in the Middle Ages!" you'll hear them squeal, and their plebeian delight will inspire your pre-death flashback to timeless memories of robed students harassing the rampant homeless, college porters dying to Lyme's disease, and misogynistic comments by professors that would make Nietzsche blush. "My God!" are your final words, "The tourists are right!". But the bus claims you before you remember even tenth century peasants weren't drinking shit.

We will from here recount the onward journey for Oxford's fresh survivors - those wiser than to cycle the Magdalen bridge roundabout, to confess anxiety to the Dean of Welfare, or to linger after class with their tutor. After matriculation, your next enrolment ritual is the choosing of your social faction. Will you join the boot-licking royalists in saluting the Queen's fireside portrait, or the Champagne Socialists who swear their salute is merely ironic? Choose quickly - the few incognito republicans about will soon have the portrait swapped for a poorly rendered cat, denying tomorrow's postgraduate committee (in good fashion, obfuscated as the "middle common room") the necessary quorum to triple the biscuit budget. Fret not if you missed her majesty's painting and your chance to insert your two 'contrarian' cents on Prince Andrews; you'll anyway pay it toward his family's heating bill at next tax, and plenty of other unscrupulous fraternities still await you. Will you rub elbows with the Oxford Unionists to secure a front-row seat at Shapiro's thinly veiled rant on white-Semitic supremacy, or help the dialectical materialists commandeer their father's second beachside holiday house? Children of alumni should note that Daddy's Little Aristocrats have rebranded to the Sailing Club as of 66, and membership of the Piers Pig Knob Bobbers Society has been severely dwindling since Hugh Grant made it uncool. In contrast, the 'Dreaming Spires' Anglophilics Anonymous has swelled with Americans in the wake of definitely-unexpectedly-Hard (Boris promises) Brexit. 

Whatever your clique, it pays to be prepared. Thankfully their reading lists are fixed; Dostoevsky, Jung, Foucault, Butler, and Kant should at least permit you an occasional interjection in the wood-panelled common room banter. The tedium of actually reading these authors is mostly avoided by feigning a superior, scholarly boredom; "I couldn't finish Heidegger's Being and Time - ten pages in and I was checking my watch!". Be sure to remain imprecise: the Oxford scholar knows never to present and make vulnerable a clear thesis, and to instead gesture toward ill-defined notions of "Hegelian actualisation" and "Kafkaesque Machiavellianism". Sprinkling in "intersectional", "de-colonial", and "post-transient", followed by a wince-inducing Žižek impression, should ensure that your hot take on the dining hall's Yorkshire pudding goes mostly unchallenged. 

As a proud student of the eighth-time Times Higher Education top university of the world, you will enjoy state-of-the-art facilities not limited to: a rumouredly Michelin Star cafeteria specialising in chips and baked beans; a lovely manicured lawn (upon which you are forbidden to walk) complemented by an idyllic nearby park (into which you are forbidden after sundown); a "powerlifting" gym boasting a single squat-rack; a "lateral climbing wall" of holes crudely carved into a brick-walled corridor of the "sports centre"; an overstrained network of unqualified counsellors and apathetic doctors ready to dismiss your every ailment as run-of-the-mill student hypochondria; and a derelict office in a dilapidating, centenarian hovel. Humanities students needn't worry about the office's absence of insulation, air-conditioning, and winter-heating; you will be mercifully deprived of an office altogether. You might instead choose to work in your 40 squared-foot bedroom, or your college's bitterly cold barely-weatherproof library. No, not that beautiful library next door - you unknowingly enrolled into the poor college, silly!

Don't let these indigent settings breed pessimism; the university has been busy collecting donations from multinational fossil fuel corporations, humiliated money laundering banking groups, and opioid crisis-fuelling pharmaceutical oligarchs. You can bet that money is on its way to bolster student amenities and equilibrate college endowments, and won't go anywhere near the chancellor's salary of a half million pounds. Incidentally, if you are a graduate student, your own meek funding will have by now exhausted. With your fifth bicycle stolen, your savings crippled by a frugal life in the UK's 2nd most expensive city, and your Waitrose-frequenting landlord eagerly eyeing next term's impending cohort of trust fund babies, it's time to find some more cash. Thankfully your department seeks your minimum-wage expertise for exam marking, endowing the buying power of three High St coffees an hour. Then, further good news! The geriatric pedagogue of your subject, for decades cemented as your college's only tutor, has been finished off by a rough game of croquet, finally opening the role. Be sure to note the fine print: that your majority time spent marking is miraculously half as valuable as your time spent tutoring - that's relativity, baby!

For those unlucky to miss the post, and that as a rent-waived Junior Dean tasked with tactfully ignoring undergraduate complaints, it is time to hit the downward slope. Try to resist undignifiedly clutching at the advertised emergency welfare funds on the way down; they will prove as illusory as the college's bureaucrats are malign, and your struggle serves only to evoke the ex-finance and ex-military bursars' gleeful past days of repossessing homes and shooting Yemeni civilians. Instead, consider foregoing the £1400 average rent and settle in a box on Cornmarket St - a sunny spot, at least thrice a year, in the town's centre. You would spare the institution quite some fuss, and can bask in the background zen of the exceptionally well mannered school-skipping teenagers - "spawn of townies", you once called them - and the angelic, amplified voices of the daytime-tipsy karaoke buskers. A darker day might draw you down to Cowley Rd, where screeching at strangers is an accepted, soothing ritual. You might finally consider a recourse opted by a handful of undergraduates every year; suicide. 

Before you know it, you've passed. Discarded your subfusc, doffed your mortarboard, donned your Tudor bonnet, and flamped your shmwlamper. Marched out of the Sheldonian with the other shit-eating grinners, branching outward into your diverse careers in consulting, offshore banking, management consulting, securities fraud, consulting again, conservative politics (primarily public fund embezzling), and being the children of gentry. We hope you learned a lot during your short time at Oxford, even despite the unending teaching strikes, and that you can look fondly upon all the moments unspoiled by talking to a poor person, or a non-white foreigner, or a Brookes student. The university cannot wait to see you again - hopefully richer and near death – but please understand some time apart is needed; they have cancelled your Bod card, and with it comes the sudden loss of all your basic human dignities. The once familiar doors, porters, and your peers no longer recognise you. Get out.

And don't forget to donate!