My God, Amazing that We Got This Far, It's Like We're Chasing All Those Stars

Hi everyone! This week is the end of my third week of Michaelmas Term here. (Whoo! Quarter of the way done; almost halfway done!) It's amazing how quickly time is flying by, and I've only just realized how intense the tutorial system is. I've basically completed roughly three months of fall semester in three weeks. Well, my math might be a little off, but it certainly feels like I've crammed three months of work into three weeks! Anyway, I hope those of you back home made it out of midterms alive and well!

In other news, yesterday Oxford University students held a demonstration protesting the Browne Review. The Browne Review is summed up nicely in the following bullet points that I received in an email the other day:

• Browne Review recommends:
- Lifting the cap on tuition fees.
- Higher Education teaching funding slashed by 80%.
- Marketisation of Higher Education imitating US Model.
- Removal of state funding from all subjects except ‘strategically valuable’ subjects, that is Science, Engineering, Medicine and ‘some’ foreign languages.

Now, I'm no expert on this at all, but from what I could gather from other students, all (or most) UK universities, including Oxford, charge around the same price for tuition, which is a little over £3,000, and they can charge less than that but not more. The Browne Review would make it similar to the US, where different schools can charge what they like for tuition (with the exception of the state schools). If anyone wants to read more about it, here's a link. I really wanted to participate in the protest, since 1. I think the US education system favors the rich, and I would hate for it to happen in the UK too and 2. I would like to return to Oxford for grad school and the Browne Review would probably make that financially impossible, but I couldn't since I had to run to the library to return books that were due that day. I did, however, take pictures as I passed through it though.

I really hope that the protest helped and that the Browne Review won't be passed, but I have a feeling that it will be, especially since the US model has been "working" for years. But then again, I'm a silly student so what do I know? =P

Anyway, I've added more pictures to my flickr account. I even back tracked and took more pictures of the places I had explored with Maggie earlier. Enjoy!

Halloween's coming up this weekend, and celebrating it in Oxford should be pretty interesting. =)

Well, Happy Halloween and Cheers!
Nutmeg