Inside Oxford University: What it’s like to sneak into a Physics lecture

Oxford University: a life worlds apart from Brookes, and one which I wanted to explore. My Oxford friend granted me exclusive access into this elite institution by inviting me along to his Physics lecture, but he warned: “No offence, but I can hardly follow half the stuff myself.”

Nervously, I walked into the department, trying to blend in, but I was flawed straight away. Forget about the post-modern shit we have here at Brookes – this place was straight out of the 1950s with chalk and blackboards. Who on earth still has blackboards?

Why all the sweaters? Literally everyone was wearing sweaters. It wasn’t even cold.The funny thing was they were a universal phenomenon. The suavely dressed students to the I-just-crawled-out-bed students were all clad in Ted Baker stuff. Even the laziest dressing Ox student trumps the average Cheney boy. Next point, jawlines. Say what you will about the Oxonians, their gene pool is flawless. They literally all could be the next 007.

What are these

When I’d gotten over being blown away by how amazing their cheek bones and jawlines were, I actually had to try and focus on the physics. When did letters become a viable replacement for numbers in equations and formulas? We all know “x, y and z”, we like “x, y and z”  – they helped us through GCSE algebra. But every number being replaced with a letter? Too far, my annoyingly-intelligent friends. They didn’t even use letter from the Latin alphabet. At Oxford, they use Greek letters, like sigma and epsilon. Useful.

At no point during this mind-fuck of sigmas, epsilons and kappas did anyone take out a phone and start unloading any misery onto Snapchat. No “OMDs just kill me now”, or “totes gonna need a Starbucks to get me thru this #basic”. These insane people were actually engaging with the material. And there was me, a Philosophy student whose lectures usually consist of discussions of the ontological categorisations of aardvarks.

Help

Contemplating dem aardvarks

Even more unnerving was their formality. Their laughs are slightly stiff, like a rock slide. They are perceptive to a fault. Whereas we go to our lectures to try and chat up the person we met in Fuzzies, Oxonians go to their lectures to learn. I definitely stood out, being the random African not taking notes, but then something changed. Ever seen a bunch of meerkats stand up simultaneously? It was like that.

Finally, they ended in perhaps the most stereotypical way possible. They applauded at the end of the lecture, like the lecturer was Corbyn or something. At this point I was too weirded out, and despite the kind invitation to stay for quantum mechanics, I got the hell out of there.