When I went to a "top tier" uni in the 90s after watching the young ones and reading adrian mole I expected students to be going to rallies and being "intellectual". I spent more time reading about other subjects than my own and underperformed in my degree. Students were mostly over-privileged rich kids, doing exactly what you'd expect young people to do when they first got a chance of freedom.
I was lucky enough to get a full grant, which I wouldn't get now and overall I enjoyed the experience, which echoed far after I left the environment. It wasn't quite what I expected it would be though.
I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it would happen anywhere, but it is surprising to me that it is not strongly discouraged in society overall and at top academic institutions in particular.
Most Asian students I met who had come over to Europe were pretty serious.
Anecdotally some friends from Wales who went on a study year to America were put into counselling and threatened with expulsion for their "drinking problems", they were pretty normal British students really, I think they ended up somewhere fairly conservative.
I suspect there is a big difference in Russia between top science universities and everywhere else. In my opinion, humanities education is of very poor quality in Russia so I could well imagine a party culture there. But the curriculum in top science programmes tends to be so intense and passing requirements strict enough that I doubt there is too much partying going on. However, a lot of the coursework I suspect is also still too outdated and often irrelevant.
There is also likely a big difference between students living at home and living in dorms. Who knows what happens in dorms, but the commuting students in my opinion don't tend to get too wild.
Finally, the social scene is just structured very differently. There are fewer elected subjects, and most of the social life happens during/between classes - the whole year just spends a lot of time with each other naturally and bonds over common struggles. There is a culture of trying to involve everyone in some sort of social life. You don't have to sign up for anything - it happens by default. Although I think international students would be treated differently and actually perhaps excluded. Instead of clubbing or going to bars, social drinking revolves more around drinking in someone's kitchen and engaging in pseudo-philosophical conversations.
Of course, my account is from a long time ago so things may be very different now.
I grew up in the UK, and agreed with every word. Especially the bit about social contact and drinking. When travelling in other cultures, I still find it insanely difficult to start a conversation with a stranger unless we're in some situation that I can think of as a pub (and even then it's not easy). The way that random Americans will spark up conversations anywhere is alarming, but I'm envious.
The drinking culture is weird. It's interesting seeing the German drinking culture here in Berlin as a contrast.
You’d think so, but the whole culture has this problem. Western societies have replaced Christianity with the religion of hedonism and “self actualization.” It’s aspirational—most people don’t even live or want to live that way. But it would be taboo to condemn it or at least mark you as someone who wasn’t with the times.
I was totally underwhelmed by the quality of the kids. I'd won a math contest with a couple of Polish kids in my team the summer before, and I thought my new classmates would be much the same: engaged, sharp. Instead I got a couple of fellows who seemed to be there for the drinking. It was quite deflating.
I did eventually round up a number of people with a better attitude, mostly from international circles. It's not like we were teetotal, just the balance of work and play seemed to fit an elite university better. Luckily I managed to forge a group of friends across colleges.
I also started to see there was no logic to who got in. It seemed to be purely a confidence game, especially for the arts subjects. I mean sure, they were probably better academically than your average person, but above some low bar it seems to be a lottery. I started meeting a lot of people who spoke confidently about things, but their confidence did not seem to be grounded in reality. There were so many of these people it gave away the game, I'm not sure I'd have noticed if I hadn't seen this concentration of BSers as a young man.
What was really missing was a love of learning. It's as if the kids had spent years gaming exams under high parental pressure, and now they were at uni as long they could get out with an OK grade they wanted to relax and explore the social world.
The tutorial system was wasted on some of my classmates. It's cringeworthy to be in a lesson with either 2 or 3 students, and one or two of the other kids hasn't done work. I also got proper sparring partners from outside my college, so I did ok eventually.
> kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all.
I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :)
> you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college
There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it doesn't have to be that way, you can organise alternatives, and there's a whole intercollegiate infrastructure of extracurricular activities. There was a somewhat long-running university computer society when I was an undergrad, through which I found all the hackers, and some of us ended up starting a hosting service in my third year: https://www.srcf.net/ - that taught me far more of practical use than half the computing course.
May balls: yes, these are a bit odd and above my personal poshness threshold. I think they really do date from the era of Turing but not his subculture within that era, the big black tie social event belongs more to capital-S Society of debutantes and aristocrats.
> What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically.
The difficulty gap is real. Unlike all the education system people will have encountered previously, you can't coast unless you are very smart, and there will be extremely challenging material. It's .. deliberate is the wrong word, but there are certainly tutors who will up the difficulty level if their students are not struggling.
The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.
> The more ambitious kids were more busy padding their CV to land a good job than doing what interests them.
This is far more what Oxford is "for" in British society because that's how you get ahead, unfortunately.
Feynman drank, played bongo, womanised, slept with some of his friends' wives.
But that does not mean everyone who does that is a great Physicist. Neither all great Physicists do these.
Taking an outlier and using him for justification of something seems obtuse.
I love Feynman, and have a picture of him on my wall. But that does not mean I idealize or even like everything he did in his life.
Incidentally, I've not read much about his womanising - perhaps I'm not reading between the lines?
And although the bomb was used on the Japanese, it was meant primarily as a weapom against Hitler.
Feynman was an American Jew. Imagine yourself in the same situation. There's a dictator who hates all Jews and basically any race which is not Aryan enough for him. He wants to kill them all. A gigantic war machine which is fighting the rest of the world alone is also possibly building something similar.
You get the opportunity to work on something that undermines the devil, that will buy you and your country protection against it. Will you not work in it?
If it adapts to pedagogic techniques now known to be more effective, that’s a good thing. If it instead adapts to changes in the students themselves, I think that’s more likely to be bad than good, or is at a minimum not obviously good.
Obviously there have been changes in the students over the years, not least the fact that the universities now admit women and Catholics. There have also been far broader changes in society; it wouldn't be illegal for Turing to be gay in the present Cambridge.
On a more serious note, it comes back to what are top universities for? Excellent learning - you said that the tutorials, lectures and practicals were good to great, and I can assure you this is not true of all universities. But also: Building up a network. Gaining credentials. Learning those subtle cues that will allow you to mix with the elite.
For example, in fresher's week, 'default' organized activities were clubbing every night of the week. Sports achievements were celebrated with ceremonies, pub parties, chalk drawings on the walls of the college, publications in the magazines.
There is nothing wrong with any of those activities, as has been mentioned that is just what some loud teenagers getting a taste of freedom like to do. But you would expect a top academic institution encouraging other tendencies to even out the social 'hierarchy' a bit. The very fact that 'you might not have noticed the studious ones' who were 'hiding away in their rooms' is the problem when it is happening at the top academic institution in my view.
I don't know how you managed to miss this during your university career, but there are absolutely tons of clubs in every university. Sports, political, hobbies, music, etc. Nothing to do with drinking, apart from maybe a once or twice yearly optional social night.
There are 400 clubs registered at the OU student's union:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/life/clubs
Including compsoc, which would have been a way to meet your fellow CS grads:
And a competitive computer security club:
And they're just the ones I found by searching computer.
You could've packed your calender with different activities meeting new people every night and never have felt the need to drink a single drop.
After all, you are not interested in these things narrowly and specifically. You just would like to hang out with like-minded people that like to have fun in these sorts of ways.
In these societies, you mostly end up with some specific 'serious' activities (e.g. a talk, a lecture, a discussion, or something competitive). And social engagement then happens separately, usually at a social in a pub, also as a 'targeted' activity. It is a good way to get more serious about your interests, but does not seem like a natural way to make friends.
At my graduate institution, the undergraduate attitude was quite different; socializing was important, learning the minimal amount was efficient, and cheating was socially accepted (by peers, not necessarily the profs).
I was shocked at the difference in academic achievement this caused. The tests at the second institution were far easier, yet people were failing them. This was a difference between scoring 80% on nontrivial proofs, vs scoring 60% on one-step theorem applications. I don't think the incoming freshmen were vastly inferior. Rather, the culture at the first institution forced students to apply themselves through peer pressure, because that's what they perceived everyone else to be doing, and also what was valued. My advisor at the second institution seemed quite pessimistic about changing its culture, and viewed the first institution as a rare exception that would not be emulatable. He did agree on the extent of the difference.
From the prof perspective, this is all irrelevant because it's quite rare for a school to develop a good culture, so it's not the experienced reality for most profs. Asking to become faculty at a top institution where the undergraduates also all care about academics is like wishing for unicorns.
* Some selection bias here: I took grad classes, so these were the only math majors I had exposure to. Although, these were the only classes available because the school was small, so I'm not sure what an undergraduate could take if he didn't want to take grad classes.
Like other universities, things are also going to differ between subjects. But OxBridge has autonomous colleges which provide undergrad accommodation and arrange the individual tutorials/supervisions for undergrads. So there, college culture also matters. Some colleges certainly have a posher reputation than others, some have a reputation for being sportier, and so on. If you read a typical "OxBridge is really like this" articles without bearing that in mind you'll think the whole place is one thing.
A) Incredibly smart and hard-working students that want to be around the leading experts in their fields. These kids end up as post docs / researchers, and get to work/stay close to those schools.
B) The ones that want to land elite jobs (gov / banking / finance / law / etc.) - for these, the social activities are quite more important.
Don't get me wrong, you need to be a top-tier student / pupil to get in, and the latter students are also such. But different priorities.
Gaining a position in academia is something that takes a lot of time, so the disappointment is still with me.
I'm curious if you can be a professor after the old model, before structured academia, find those willing to learn and do research and continue your passion without the encumbrances (and benefits) of a Uni. That probably depends on your subject area.
- peer-review for journals and conferences
- a fellowship and guest lectures
- collaborating with my previous co-authors in my own time
- publishing educational content
and you're right, it is something I'm passionate about. The list above is my attempt to stay involved, but I'm not sure how that will work out long term. Hopefully I will find something sustainable.
One thing I loved about my program (Baylor) is that they had a dedicated dorm building for engineering/CS students. I think it's because their program wasn't very prolific and they were trying to attract people (though I had no real complaints about it), but it created this awesome environment where the average person on your floor probably had a gaming desktop to show off, or would love to talk about a project idea you had, or might have an idea of how to recover the linux install you've just borked, or might be hosting a Minecraft LAN you could join. Not to mention the study-group opportunities, etc. It was a really great way to spend my first two years.
The academic part of life was good. The tutorial system is great, lectures were OK, practicals were good. The selection of courses was great. But doing CS, there were few opportunities to socialize with people in your degree - you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college. And that isn't great - perhaps it's good for people that are doing humanities and need to 'network', but for anyone doing anything interesting, you are not going to find too much in common with an undergrad studying English literature and more interested in drinking and pointless gossip/small talk.
And even many in the CS degree did not seem to have that 'hacker' mentality - that was mostly seen in international students.
What I found shocking is that so many students were doing poorly academically. The coursework and the exams were not super challenging, especially given that you chose so many of the courses, so you were mostly studying the actual things you wanted to study. Given that Oxford was supposed to have the very best students, passionate about their subjects, it was really odd how little so many cared.
Again, very strangely, few undergrad students from England seemed to go on to do Master's or PhDs, but many international students did. The graduate-level environment seemed much better, too.