Why I'm here.

So, as many of you know, I'm actually here to study stuff and not just here to muck about Europe for nine months. What you may not know is what I'm actually studying and why it makes me the anomaly of all of New College.

Here at Oxford, there is no such thing as a degree in philosophy. All the philosophy is taught as a part of a group of degrees. There are several ways one can do this, but the most popular way seems to be PPE. It's a common phrase around here and it stands for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. The focus on the degree seems to be on the 'E' part of it, but for the time being I've grouped myself with the PPE students in order to go to my library orientations, group meetings, etc. Other degrees that include this are Philosophy and Physics, Philosophy and Mathematics, and Philosophy and Psychology.

So, to New College it's strange enough that I'm doing what I call 'straight philosophy' without doing anything else. But when I tell my classmates, either ND or New College, what I'm studying, I'm met with universal derision. "Philosophy? Always hated that subject. Never saw the point."

To make matters even worse, I love the logic aspect of philosophy, so much so that I specified on my application to study here that I would study basically nothing but aspects of logic while I was here. If I thought just being a philosopher was unpopular, I was totally unprepared for the hatred people here have for logic. "Oh, yeah, I hated those classes, that's why I dropped the P in PPE." "You really want to study that? It's so awful."

Yes, I really do want to study it, and I quite enjoy it, thank you very much. I intend on taking full advantage of Dr. Halbach's resources and branching out as far as I can in this substudy.

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As a sidenote to all of this, New College/Oxford's IT departments leave much to be desired. I have no wireless internet in my room, I had to retrieve all of my passwords, and our e-mail has not yet been moved from the old host to the new host (creating a slew of problems when we tried to sign on to Nexus and found out we were still on Herald). Most of the ND people are now known by sight to the IT office, and I have learned how to decipher some pretty strange handwriting to discover my pre-set passwords for some of these things.

Also, I need to remember to bring my camera to more things, because it is absolutely beautiful outside right now (slanted morning sunlight) and I haven't taken pictures of the college or the city as a whole yet.

I'm off to the New College fresher's fair in a few minutes, and I probably have another busy day ahead of me. Still don't have school supplies like notebooks, folders, pens, or pencils... I've had my head on completely backwards for about a week now. At least at this point I'm relatively settled in and have a fair grasp of the major streets of Oxford. Pip pip for now (or however these people say it.)

- Jen -