Onto a New Plane

Another Thursday morning, another night without sleep before my primary tutorial. I’ve always had odd sleeping patterns, but at Oxford, it’s so much worse. With so much less structure to my day and no time commitments or obligations, it’s so easy to stay awake until 4:00 AM and sleep until 11:00 AM. The fact that we live in Jericho means that it is also easy to never leave the flat. When it’s 40 degrees outside and you have nowhere to be, spending the day in pajamas is so appetizing. Forget the library! It will still be there tomorrow.

I woke up at 11:00 AM on Tuesday, took a 30 minute nap 9:30-10:00 AM on Wednesday, a 2 hour nap 7:30-9:30 PM on Wednesday night, an hour nap 1:00-2:00 PM today, and I won’t actually be going to bed until midnight tonight. That’s two all-nighters in a row and 61 hours broken up by only 3½ hours of sleep!!

I went to my primary tutorial completely sleep deprived but satisfied with my essay. I wrote it from about 11:00 PM until 8:45 AM, just in time to leave to print my essay at 9:15 AM for my 10:00 AM tutorial. Nothing like cutting it to the wire! Last week, Dr. Yee assigned me six chapters of reading. The most she’d given me in the past was three, and usually, I’d had to read two. I’ve developed the habit of outlining all of the assigned text for my essays. It helps me to think more critically about what I am reading as I am forced to discern the significance of each sentence and its place within the context of the chapter and subject. It also makes essay writing easier as I use only my outlines as I write. I sometimes highlight my outlines with different colors, each corresponding to a subtopic paragraph of my essay. If I learn nothing else at Oxford, this skill alone will have made studying here worth it. However, reading in such a thorough and involved manner makes plodding through textbooks take that much longer. I actually started my reading much earlier this week than I usually do, but the extra chapters meant that this week was particularly stressful.

When Dr. Yee read my essay, I could tell that she was pleased. I managed to incorporate many of the goals from last week and added more summary and interpretation sentences rather than giving a technical survey of psychological studies and experiments. Dr. Yee said, “Much better. You’re definitely back up into the Alpha- or Alpha Beta range.” This is still below the grades I had received my first three weeks, but these still equate to A’s on the American scale, so I can’t really complain! It feels so good to have worked through an academic slump and to have climbed out of the ditch onto a higher plane.