By Sophie Hoss
“Oxford is a lovely place to spend the summer,” one of my new professors wrote in an introductory email. “I hope you will be happy here.”
I hoped so, too. Hopping across the pond for the six-week program was the biggest gamble I had ever taken. Because I commuted to college and had never lived away from home, I considered myself to be a few beats behind my peers in establishing independence. Although the prospect of being on my own in a place I had always fantasized about was thrilling, I was terrified of fumbling and dropping the ball on this opportunity. Some of my friends had studied abroad in past semesters—Italy, Greece, France—and they all had nothing but good things to say about their experiences; they had returned home raving about the European lifestyle, their new friends and their new well-traveled outlooks on the world. Their social media pages were flooded with pictures documenting their globe-trotting adventures. As shallow as it was, I hoped that my experiences would be picture-worthy, too.
The Oxford program wasn’t run through my home university, which meant everyone I would be with in the UK would be complete strangers. I couldn’t decide whether this added pressure or reduced it. Arriving in England was a flurry of passport stamps and motion sickness. I remember very little about the journey itself, except for the Uber ride from the airport—I sagged against the window, bleary-eyed and jetlagged, vaguely cognizant of the fact that the cars were driving on the wrong side of the road. The driver said “cheers” instead of goodbye, which caught me off guard so much I said nothing in return.
At Oxford, the massive stone buildings rose above me like palaces of academia. The program director had compared the campus to Hogwarts, which I had assumed was an exaggeration or a sales ploy—it wasn’t. Everywhere I looked, there were stained glass windows, chiseled gargoyles, wrought iron gates, and immaculately manicured gardens. All it was missing were hordes of precocious child wizards donning black cloaks and pointy hats. Because it was summer, the campus was quiet and mostly deserted. The whole place felt like it was holding its breath, reserving judgement, waiting for me to prove myself worthy—good enough, smart enough, deserving enough. I felt distinctly misplaced in this hallowed landscape of somber prestige, so I stayed as quiet as possible during the tour and introductory meeting. Alone in my single dorm that first night, I laid in my unfamiliar bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark. Upon moving in, I had exchanged an awkward greeting with the girl across the hall.
“We’re sharing a bathroom,” she said.
“Oh. That’s cool.”
My room had large windows that overlooked the courtyard; I could see clearly into the rooms across from me, which prompted me to close the blinds and keep them shut for the duration of my stay. I was on one of the top floors of my building, and as I laid in bed, a steady flood of heat rippled up from the humid ground.
“This is it,” I whispered. “Sink or swim.”
I had a difficult time gelling with my new peers. The social hierarchy formed quickly—the people who went out clubbing every night rose to the top, and everyone else shifted into place below them. The atmosphere was undoubtedly a cutthroat, competitive one. Everybody I spoke to seemed to be a future lawyer, doctor, or politician who viewed this program as a pitstop on their intricately planned roadmap to success. It all struck me as distinctly high school-esque, and I found I didn’t have the energy to engage with any of it. The first week or so I established a tight, cyclical routine of going to class—Prose Fiction and British Perspectives on the American Revolution—eating, and returning to my dorm. I FaceTimed people back home, did schoolwork, started watching Breaking Bad on Netflix, and wondered whether I was having a depressive episode.
I had become very comfortable with my little college bubble at Stony Brook—I was part of a small program and knew all my professors and classmates very well; it had been years since I’d been forced to carve out a place for myself in a large group full of complicated, unspoken social dynamics. It was with visceral dread that I realized life was just a sequence of doing that very thing in an endless cycle—new jobs, new houses, and new schools would require me to start over and over and over again, never truly landing anywhere. I decided I was definitely becoming depressed.
“Are you having fun?” asked my dad over the phone.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. I looked around: I was sitting on the floor of my dorm in my pajamas with the season two finale of Breaking Bad and an empty bag of sour British gummies. It was three in the afternoon, but my lights remained off. “It’s awesome.”
“That’s great,” he said. His signal wasn’t very good, and his voice crackled slightly. It made me feel far away. “We’re so proud of you, Soph.”
Guilt gutted me. My parents had sent me abroad for the summer to become a global citizen, and all I could do was sit in the dark and feel sorry for myself? It seemed that becoming uprooted from home had been enough to send me into a tailspin. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this “independence” thing. One question nagged at me constantly: Why was going abroad so easy for everyone else?
To stave off my encroaching melancholy, I started to go exploring. Oxford itself was a picturesque English town with bustling streets, quaint shops, and ornate architecture. There was always something interesting happening or some hidden nook to stumble into. There was a flea market in the park on Wednesday afternoons with a booth that sold custom top hats. There was a bookstore that looked small from the outside, but once you began to wander around, the place opened up into bigger and bigger rooms all lined with bookshelves, unfolding over themselves into a massive tunnel. Every square inch of Oxfordshire seemed to be endowed with some great historical significance—the corner of Ship Street and Keble Road was the site where three Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake on the orders of Queen Mary I; the goat-shaped door knocker outside the library was the one that inspired C.S. Lewis to write the character Mr. Tumnus, and, subsequently, Narnia. And now, I was here too: a tourist playing scholar for the summer.
I tried talking to people after class and got mixed results. Up until that point, I hadn’t realized that women in academia were still facing sexism; because my program back home had mostly female professors and students, I hadn’t been exposed to discrimination based on my gender. I guess I figured that we had progressed past that as a society, and that my male peers would view me as an equal. In Oxford, I learned this wasn’t the case. One afternoon, I was walking back from my Prose Fiction class with two guys. I listened as they discussed their personal writing projects and their desire to be just like Hemingway, who they idolized as the epitome of a “real American writer.” At one point, they turned to me and asked what I liked to write about. I started to answer, but I barely got three words out before one of them interrupted.
“Nice,” he said, and resumed his monologue as if I had never spoken.
I split off on my own at the next crosswalk, trying to swallow down my humiliation. Was I really that boring? Being dismissed shouldn’t hurt this much, I thought. I had to get thicker skin.
The pub culture in England made it difficult to be someone who abstained from alcohol. It was yet another factor that made me feel isolated; alongside my more bacchanal peers, it was easy to feel like a stuffy, uptight killjoy. Still, when the loneliness became intolerable, I tagged along with different groups when they went out drinking. At first, I waited to be invited, but I found that if I just started walking with them, they wouldn’t question my presence. I became the designated sober buddy, helping people back to the dorms when they got too trashed to make the trek by themselves. I had some fun conversations ambling through the darkened streets of Oxfordshire, though the people I was with usually didn’t remember them the next day.
One night, one of the girls gave me an odd look. “You don’t usually come out with us.”
I laughed uncomfortably. “No, I don’t.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m glad you did.”
And just like that, I had a friend. When she confided that she felt out of place in Oxford, it took all my effort not to jump up and down. I told her I felt the same way, and we sat together for hours talking about our parallel experiences. She told me that she had also felt dismissed by the guys in our program, that she had mostly just been going to class and hiding out in her dorm, that she was homesick and riddled with imposter’s syndrome. Our commiseration aside, it turned out that we shared many common interests and an uncannily similar sense of humor. By the end of the night, my face was sore from smiling so much. Over the course of the trip, we found other people who had been lost in the shuffle, and we formed a compatible, tight-knit group. My days were no longer filled with solo meandering, but with lively company and constant laughter. I had found my footing.
The rest of the summer rushed by in cinematic snapshots: riding on a train up through the emerald Scottish glens, standing on top of the London Eye, cramming for exams, going to see Shakespeare performances in the park, making midnight runs to the grocery store. Anyone who looked at my Instagram probably assumed I had an amazing experience. And I did—it just wasn’t all highlights. I had been a late bloomer, and that was okay. Every new situation requires a different “code” to crack. As long as I can give myself grace, having to constantly learn and adapt isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can be incredibly fun, especially if you’re in good company.
Before I knew it, I was hugging my new companions goodbye and making promises to keep in touch. As soon as I got in the cab with my bags, I missed them fiercely, and was overcome with surprise by the acute loss I felt. I hadn’t anticipated becoming so attached to them; this whole time, I had been trying to make friends to save myself from being lonely, and because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. I’d gotten more than what I bargained for. That was another part of life’s constant demand for change, I figured—love and loss are two sides of the same coin.
I reunited with my dad at Heathrow Airport. The two of us were going on a father-daughter trip to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest to finish off the summer.
As we embarked on the next leg of our journey, he asked: “Was it everything you hoped it would be?” I didn’t have the words, so I just nodded and grinned.
RhetComp 