- I went to college in Vermont and then enrolled at Somerville College, Oxford.
- In the UK, I lived alone, attended black-tie balls, and avoided regular testing.
- Compared to my college life in the US, I loved my college life at Oxford more.
I’m a native New Yorker who dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina instead of going to college until my senior year of high school when I realized I was not quite talented enough to make it as a professional dancer.
I wanted a change from city life, so I went to Middlebury College in Vermont, but soon missed the hustle and bustle I was used to. Since my Ukrainian-born mother dreamed of returning to Europe, she begged me to consider transferring to a university in England or France.
But in the early 2000s, you couldn’t transfer from US to UK colleges. So I reapplied for the degree I hoped to study and headed off to Somerville College, Oxford, where I would “read” — major in — Modern Languages, French, and Russian.
I quickly earned the moniker “American Jen,” discovered that almost everyone’s degree except mine was three years long, and met my future husband in my dorms my first month there. I guess you could say I loved it — I still live in England. Most of all, it opened my eyes to many differences between US and UK college life.
In England, I studied my subject — and only my subject
While some universities in the UK are now experimenting with liberal-arts offerings, typically, people apply for one subject and study it for their whole degree. That meant I spent my university years obsessively reading and analyzing French and Russian texts and never looking at a math equation again — thankfully.
But I do sometimes wish I could have taken the odd psychology or art-history class instead of trying to figure out which English word best fit my translation of an Old Church Slavonic text.
Most undergraduates complete their BA in the UK in three years instead of four, but I spent my third year in Paris and St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of my studies; it was required for the Modern Language degree. At Oxford, you couldn’t simply go on a semester or year abroad if it wasn’t related to your degree, but lots of my friends had taken “gap years,” where they’d gone traveling before starting their courses.
I never had to share a dorm room in England
In the US, your first-year college roommate can become your best friend or be the inspiration for every “How to cope with a bad college roommate” article ever written. University students in England wouldn’t know; almost everyone ends up in their own space from the beginning.
At Oxford, your living experience depends a lot on your college. Some students can stay in dorms for their entire degree. Those dorms might include fireplaces and fine art along the walls — but rarely include roommates.
In my college, most people “lived out” in shared houses with friends during their second year because there weren’t enough rooms in the college to house every student.
Even though it was a Brutalist-looking slab of gray concrete erected in the 1960s, my first-year housing block will always hold a special place in my heart. I had a sink in my room and a shared bathroom and kitchen in my hallway.
In my final year, I lived in an “apartment-style” dorm — with its own kitchen and two spacious bedrooms — with my friend.
My homework grades didn’t count, and I never had regular tests at Oxford
Instead of being divided into semesters like back in the US, the academic year in the UK comprises three terms. I started each year at the end of September and finished at the end of June.
At Oxford, I also didn’t have midterms, finals, major coursework, or essays that my grades depended on. I had a lot of work, though: translations, prose compositions from English into French or Russian, essays, literary textual-analysis papers, and reading Proust and Tolstoy in the original — but none of those grades counted toward my final result.
Instead, I needed to pass exams at the end of my first year, and then I wasn’t tested again until the end of my final year.
My college social life looked a lot different in the UK
There might not be a fraternity and sorority culture in UK universities, but there was plenty of drinking in my day, especially since the legal drinking age is 18 in England. I practically lived in pubs — and fell asleep in them every once in a while.
My college years in England involved a lot of dressing up for fancy-dress-themed “bops,” or dances with cheesy music, and black-tie balls. The formal dinners we had at Oxford surprised me the most. There, I found myself sharing wine at the same table as my professors — or even the college principal.
Sadly, I never learned how to be quick-witted around people I wanted to impress, but I did pick up another important skill: Not to drink — ever — around anyone I want to look good in front of.
I also learned that my college life in the UK was all-around better than the one I experienced in Vermont.
