India Lenon

Two weeks ago I sat my first set of university exams. The experience was a gruelling one, not only because we sat thirty-three hours of exams over eight days – rumour has it that Classics ‘Mods’ at Oxford are second only to the entrance exams to the Japanese civil service in terms of intensity – but because for the first time since I sat the entrance test for my secondary school aged 11, how I performed really mattered.

To anyone over the age of about 25, the idea that exams are the be-all and end-all of a university course is probably a natural one. But today’s education system has taught students a “if at first you don’t succeed” attitude to testing. The option of re-sits and coursework means that by the end of the sixth-form many teenagers find themselves in the position of being able to write their names on the… Read More

I am no economist, but there is one thing which I am prepared to predict when it comes to the banking industry, and that is that financial crisis and public condemnation or not, it will remain both salary-centric and discriminatory for many years to come.

A survey conducted by Oxford University has found that 85 per cent of women students at Oxford feel that ‘people like me’ would face discrimination in the financial services industry, and that 75 per cent of all students surveyed felt that it was ‘not supportive of society’ – and yet 10 per cent of students here go on to work in the City. In my experience, many more than that seriously consider doing so.

It is a statement of the obvious to say both that students are attracted to highly-paid careers, and that people go into banking knowing that it is hardly a charitable endeavour. However the result… Read More

Having displayed almost dismal apathy for most of the year and a half that I’ve been here, my college at Oxford has finally taken a stand on a political issue. For the first time since my arrival I have witnessed the kind of passionate emotions akin, I imagine, to those displayed by the student activists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Sadly however, the issue which roused so many out of their state of perpetual indifference did not quite share the world-saving, peace-spreading principles of the days of hippy protest. Someone, very bravely, had suggested taking away our meat.

Several Oxford colleges have recently debated and voted on the introduction of ‘Meat Free Mondays’, a campaign started by Linda and Paul McCartney as a means to promote animal welfare and reduce the ‘climate-changing impact of meat production and consumption’. Yet only Jesus College has fully adopted the scheme.

I can honestly say that… Read More

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The majority of university students pay their own fees. We will all end up with the same degrees and we will all be competing for the same jobs, so why on earth should those with wealthier parents have to pay more?

Last week a government review of university funding proposed that students from ‘middle-class families’ should not only be denied grants and cheap loans, but should also be charged higher tuition fees, raising the cost of a university education by around £7000 a year.

The student loans system is a great drain on government resources: they take up 28% of higher education funding and the taxpayer loses one third of the money given out because of the freeze on interest until graduation. If it were a universal fact then that everyone’s parents paid their fees, then the first of the proposals would be… Read More

Between the ages of two and five, I wanted to be a princess with hair down to the ground when I grew up. So did most of my friends, except the ones who wanted to be fairies. We all wore pink, had pink duvet covers, and played with largely pink toys.

The tools of patriarchal oppression?

Funnily enough though, now that we’re at university, we’ve begun to look at other career options. Even if Oxford offered a course in pink-fairy-princess-ism, I probably wouldn’t have applied – which makes me rather surprised at the widespread backing received by the ‘Pinkstinks’ campaign.

Even Bridget Prentice, the Justice Minister, has lent her support today to the campaign, which calls for a boycott of shops selling pink toys and clothes for girls. The group’s theory is that such items are ‘sexist’,… Read More

Given that as a penniless student I rarely purchase anything other than the bare essentials needed to stay clean and to eat (a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea), I rarely feel I have much to say about consumer reports.

Yesterday, however, a survey conducted by Debenhams revealed that in the course of his lifetime, the average man only buys 17 years’ worth of underwear, leaving his mother and then his wife to pick the pants the rest of the time.
The part of the survey that caught my attention most was the revelation that the 17-year period in question, where men are compelled (or allowed, depending on how you look at it) to buy their own briefs, is between the ages of 19 and 36.

This means that when boys my age leave home for the first time, many are embarking on difficult and uncharted waters in more ways than… Read More

It’s my birthday today, and thankfully, although I have now left my teenage years behind, I’m being made to feel rather young. This is because on the very same day of the very same year that I was born, the Berlin Wall ceased to be, and most of the pieces written this week commemorating the event have been by people who are clearly recounting memories which are still fresh. My mother, who was lying in a bed in the maternity ward when the first bricks started to give way, says that it hardly feels like ‘history’ at all.

Yet to my generation, the idea is incredibly alien. It is hard to contemplate that had I been born just a few hours earlier, it would have been into a world in which a city so close to home was so literally divided.

The closest that most people of my age have ever come to… Read More

Smug smiles around Oxford today. The Cambridge University student-run website The Tab this week featured a section called ‘Tab Totty’ – a series of pictures of female Cambridge undergraduates posing “semi-naked” in “provocative positions”. Both fellow Cambridge students and the general British populace are shouting over each other to condemn the article as sexist and demeaning.

I am inclined (however reluctantly) to stick up for Cambridge on this one. Firstly, even in terms of student journalism, the piece was hardly seminal. ‘Fit Fresher’ contests and swimwear ‘fashion shoots’ abound in most student papers I’ve seen. Many would argue that this in itself is wrong, and they would probably be right – but it is unfair to single out The Tab in this way.

Secondly, The Tab styles itself as a spoof of national tabloid newspapers, and the feature was designed to satirise ‘Page 3’. In just the same way as Oxford’s satirical… Read More

Babies are low on my list of priorities right now. For most of my fellow female undergraduates, pregnancy is something only ever mentioned by the college nurse in the context of prevention, and I imagine things will stay this way for a fair few years to come.

However, it would appear that even if we don’t look at ourselves as peak-fertility time-bombs, our potential employers might well. This week, Nichola Pease, the most powerful woman in British business, went on record as saying that big City firms are increasingly put off from employing young women because Britain’s statutory maternity leave is “too long”.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow that while we attempt, upon graduation, to find a place on the housing ladder, perhaps a partner, but above all a job, the stages of our lives that haven’t even occurred to us yet might be standing in our way.

Nichola Pease, however, i… Read More

Traumatised mutterings are flying around the dreaming spires this morning. The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings has placed University College London higher than Oxford in its most recent league table, in a move that rightly challenges the perception of Oxbridge as being in a class of its own.

Judging by my own application to universities almost exactly two years ago, there are indeed an increasing number of fields where other institutions, and those in London in particular, outstrip Oxford and Cambridge. Entry into these oldest and most famous universities grows more competitive each year, but the result of this is that other universities are offering better and better alternatives in order to attract the growing numbers of those who do not make it in, or who simply want a less traditional approach to higher education. For students of many disciplines there are more up-to-date, relevant courses awaiting them around… Read More