Forget 5th Week Blues — 0th Week Is the Real Killer: Life on the Oxford Hamster Wheel
"Welcome back to Oxford," the email reads... Yeah, because nothing screams 'welcome' like the impending doom of exams. Oh, and don’t forget the essays due in both 0th and 1st week. This week, I reflect on the chaos of 0th week - and why it truly feels like the hamster wheel that is Oxford.
Oxford isn’t so much a university as it is a hamster wheel — and nowhere is that clearer than 0th week of Trinity Term. While the 5th week is famously associated with the “blues,” academic exhaustion often arrives much earlier. For me, 0th week might just be the hardest of all. The cycle of deadlines, commitments, and chaos doesn’t gently begin, and before you’ve even unpacked your suitcase, you’re already sprinting to keep up.*
My Trinity Term 0th week was chaotic. Having been told my tutor could no longer teach me—on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, no less—I was given another tutor at the last minute. I was slightly worried about the organisation of the upcoming term. To most people, I come across as quite worried about planning—I mean, my face comes with subtitles — unfortunately, it's sometimes unavoidable. Whilst the matter was resolved promptly, it was a strange start to the term.
To add to the strains of 0th week, I had one
tutor set us an essay for Monday of 1st week. Work never ends here.
Having rushed back to Oxford on the next available train on Tuesday morning –
after remembering I had a meeting on Wednesday – I headed straight to the
college library to continue working. Collections had been set for Thursday, and
after what can only be described as the bluntest end-of-term report known to
man, I wanted to try and show my tutor I wasn’t as much of an idiot as he
thought I was.
Did I achieve that? Not remotely. If anything, I think he finished
reading the essay more confused — and possibly concerned — about my obsession
with the 5th century. In my defence – if you can even call it that - I threw up before the exam. The stress of collections, two essays, feeling ill, and a looming class may have just tipped me over the edge. So, the 0th week never gives you enough
time to function and finish work.
I had an essay to write over the vacation, as the tutor didn’t
make us do much writing in the term – but I also knew that it was smart to get
it out of the way before returning. What was not fine was my tutor for this
term casually dropping an email on Tuesday of 0th week, at 11 pm no
less, saying ‘hey guys, the essay is due Monday at 5 pm.’ If this were any
other week, that would be fine, but 0th to 1st week, it
means you don’t get a weekend. If you’re at Oxford, you probably read that and
laughed — ‘Weekend? What weekend?’ In reality, many people work on the weekends
and even bank holidays. In theory, weekends exist. In practice, they’re just
weekdays with fewer emails. There is never really any proper downtime
enforced. I even had emails from a tutor yesterday (on a Saturday).
The constant workload means constant pressure. This place
can be toxic: emails at all hours, weekend deadlines, and no real way to switch it off.
As a historian, we have around 1 to 1.5 pieces of work due a week.
This is a lot lower than say a STEM student, but it is important to remember
that one piece of work entails a lot of work. Reading takes around 20-30 hours,
then you need to plan which takes you on average 2 hours, and then writing
which is around 4-5, and editing anywhere upwards of 1 hour. The process of
writing is absolutely gruelling, and the pressure cooker of Oxford certainly
amplifies it.
Essays being due in the 0th week and the 1st week means you have no downtime for two weeks straight. You are working hard and don’t get to take much of a break because you need to stay on top of reading. Yes, you could try and take a day off here and there but then you will find that instead of 1 or 2 readings you planned to do that day the next day becomes 3 or 4 plus. Reading is tiring, and you need to have structure to ensure you don’t burn yourself out before the term even starts. The real issue here is the pressure being placed on students to perform well in short time frames and expecting them to maintain these standards over a gruelling 9-week term.
The expectations and the consistency of the workload, therefore, make it a ‘hamster wheel.’ Work is set, you read, write, edit, then submit, then it all starts again. There is little space to decompress after it and reflect and make it even better, because there is always something next. It isn’t about your best work, sometimes it is just about getting the job done. Until Oxford acknowledges just how unsustainable this cycle is, its hamster wheel will keep turning — and we’ll keep running.
As a fellow Oxford student, this post is all too relatable, and addresses an extremely important element of Oxford life that is usually accepted as 'just the way it is'. Here are some of my thoughts I want to contribute to the conversation:
ReplyDeleteAs discussed in this post, there is essentially no relief from the pressure, which seems to be the defining feature of the university experience at Oxford. The typical workload (one to two essays per week, each with a long reading list, as well as tutorials, classes, and lectures) means that there is very little free time in a nine-week term (Week 0 is, as observed in this article, itself extremely stressful) for students to engage meaningfully with interests beyond the academic coursework or to properly relax. Apart from the consequence of burnout, which, among other causes, contributes to half of Oxford students considering rustication (https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/02/26/dropping-out-of-oxford-revisited/), it has a severely detrimental effect even on one's social life, as it becomes extremely difficult to organise anything substantial among friends and acquaintances. The pressure reaches its maximum level immediately in Week 0, due to the in-college examinations at the start of each term and the short time before essays are due in Week 1, and lasts until the end of Week 8.
It is therefore no surprise that, in a December 2024 survey conducted by the Student Union, 38% of respondents said that their mental health had worsened in their time at Oxford (and 46% of all respondents said they had experienced a mental health crisis at Oxford), 44% and 36% said that they had experienced depression and disordered eating respectively at Oxford, and 74% said their university course had negatively impacted their mental health. Only 35% said that they were satisfied with the university's wellbeing support. (https://www.oxfordsu.org/pageassets/representation/welfaresurveyanalysis/SU-Welfare-Survey-Analysis.pdf)
Although the university does offer mental health and welfare services, the general thinking is that constant severe stress and even worse mental health issues are just part of the Oxford experience. You're just supposed to accept the stress and anxiety and keep on studying - after all, you're in Oxford to work hard, aren't you? The university is certainly not changing, refusing to, for example, introduce a reading week or extend terms to spread out the workload. Students often feel that they have to be constantly working to keep up, even if they do not get enough sleep; in some cases this results from feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, but in many other cases from the very poor support offered to students with different learning needs, who often need extra time to complete the same tasks. When you are submerged by endless reading lists, essays to write, and deadlines, rarely does it occur to you that you should seek support - all your attention is taken up by the all-consuming feeling that nothing matters apart from the mountain of work before you.
It is time we stop normalising this destructive pressure cooker environment and see it for how unhealthy it is.
Well said.
ReplyDelete