DD Miserable at Oxford Uni

[MyPearlPoster]

So DD is in her first year studying history at Oxford. She has come from a very prestigious secondary in London, where she thrived and had lots of amazing close friends, some of whom are at Oxford now too. From the start she has found it all really challenging socially, calling or messaging in tears that she hasn't found her people and feels alone in her college which seems to be rather unsociable, unfriendly and 'nerdy'. Spending time with friends from home there helps, but she says everyone seems to have a core friend group within their college, where they've all found likeminded people to eat/hang out/study with - I think she feels somewhat like the odd one out for being lonely in hers. It doesn't help that her friends at other unis, many in the US, are having the time of their lives, calling with exciting stories and posting pictures of new friends - she really feels as though she is majorly falling behind. I have told her multiple times that it takes time and that she would regret leaving Oxford but it also kills me to see her so unhappy. Academically she is doing pretty well, but not thriving perhaps as she used to, and finding it difficult to concentrate and focus because of constant anxiety etc. She is speaking to a therapist and taking a low dosage of anxiety meds which have been recommended. I think part of it is the lack of structure of it all - she was used to having a big but very tight group of supportive friends who she felt very at home with, and as a family we are all very close too. With her humanities course she hardly has any contact hours and all people in her college seem to do is study...she keeps saying it's not that Oxford is wrong for her but her college specifically but there seems no chance of moving...I know people will say to get involved with extracurriculars and she does journalism which she enjoys but finds everyone there is more of a loose acquaintance network. Apart from this, she was never particularly sporty or into music and other than those activities everyone's social lives do seem to revolve around their colleges...she makes an effort with friends of friends etc but feels afloat generally and is often lonely.

Even better, though, I think increasing her sense of agency and power over her decisions and emotions will help.

Don't give her the solution, say 'I support you, what a difficult decision, it does sound hard' and then she will make the best decision for her. She may well decide that even though it's not perfect socially, she'd rather stay. She also has a few friends so is not completely socially isolated- I suspect her tears and her comparisons are a function of anxiety, depression and the exams at the end of the year, and may well change when she gets home. My bet is- she stays, but if she doesn't, so be it. Nothing is a catastrophe unless you let it be.

This term is tough. Is any of her mood displaced stress about Prelims? She's only got 4 weeks to go.

I'd encourage her to push through to the end, get her first year marks under her belt and when she's had time to breathe over the summer she can think more clearly about what she wants. But second year really does feel very different; there are no exams, she'll meet a lot of new people just from the way the History course is structured, and she'll feel like she has more time to get involved in social things whether in or outside her college. And next year also brings a whole load of new people into college!

If she's really struggling, try talking to a welfare rep, college parent or one of her tutors. She will not be the first person they've seen who has felt like this.

I know someone who left Oxford and went to Newcastle. Of course people find they are a square peg in a round hole. Of course she might struggle elsewhere but there’s a much bigger pool of students elsewhere (mostly). Oxford is high SEN and some students aren’t looking for friends at all. Sitting in their rooms working or being in labs all day is their fun. This can really cut down possible friendships. So either she says 2nd year is not tenable fairly quickly and looks elsewhere or she has to continue. How often is she phoning home? That’s a bit immature too really.

She is not phoning home that often it's just that whenever she does she is mostly pretty miserable, and whilst I appreciate that this may come across as her being immature/unable to cope, and of course she does come from a VERY privileged background, I do think that doesn't invalidate her struggling. She is usually confident and able to manage with all sorts of people so this has thrown her for a loop.

People do leave Oxford. And there is no shame in it. But if she transferred to another uni for second year, she would miss all the freshers week and making friends element so it wouldn't help unless she started again. People do it.

She needs to give shared house a chance next year - it’s not the same as hall.
As pp have said she should get involved with other activities at university too.
Keep a close eye on her though!

This is true enough but sort of sums up the oddness of uni - the idea that freshers is a merry go round and if you miss it or mess it up that's you for the next few years, you won't have any friends!

I'm not sure that would apply to many other areas of life; if you got a job somewhere else, nobody would say there's some problem there in that you have to go along at a particular time or you won't make friends, you just pick it up as you go, people pull up a chair for you, so to speak.

My DC had a very hard time at Oxford A decade ago support for MH was much less. DC struggled and hid from us what was going on. Was asked to leave in the end after a year out when failed to submit work. Has impacted on DC life very considerably as was a brilliant student. So act quickly to resolve any issues

A good (non school) friend of mine left Oxford. She absolutely hated it, took the rest of the year off and started again at Reading, where she met her now husband! She is a very confident outgoing person. Interestingly her daughter has an offer for Pembroke College if she gets 3 As.

Except the OP’s dd is doing journalism and not finding that to be the case. “Loose acquaintances” are not friends, nor do they give the impression of being potential friends and it is not really helpful to the OP’s dd to tell her she should easily be making friends with these people.

I think just be a listening ear as others have said and ensure she knows you’re offering unconditional support whatever she decides to do. Maybe visit more often if you can - it’s easy to do as a day trip from London.

It’s sad, but not everyone has an amazing time at university but it would be a shame if she dropped out at this stage. I’d be encouraging her to get her head down, see out the next year and then go elsewhere for a Masters so she has a positive higher ed experience somewhere. Sometimes coming from a ‘very privileged’ background (which you mention) means there has always been a lot of scaffolding and support but perhaps not always opportunities to build resilience. Also, this cohort were badly affected by covid and anxiety seems to be common.

Is it that she’s told you that it’s impossible to move college? I’d check that out further but she might be too far in to do that.

First, I didn’t say she “should easily” be making friends; secondly, she hasn’t been there a year yet.

I left Oxford! I left at the end of my first year because I was doing completely the wrong subject, in part encouraged by my school which had pushed me down a STEM pathway that didn't make me happy.

I took a year out, took some different A Levels in a year and went somewhere else to do something completely different. It was fine and has not blighted my life in any way. I wish I had realised earlier that in fact I did not much like any of my A Levels either and certainly didn't want to spend three years doing any of them at any university on the planet, no matter how good I was at them.

I did have friends, though, at Oxford and at the next university. None of them have been best friends for life, those are very much my schoolfriends. But they were nice enough people, we had a happy time together, and I'm still in touch with a few of them.

Your daughter needs to talk through the friends thing with a therapist or other uninvolved party. While I'm sure you are being very kind etc, OP, I think it is sometimes the case that it's easier to take advice from a more neutral adult. If your daughter found school and making friends there very easy, she may not have learnt some of the 'how to make friends' skills that others who perhaps didn't fit in as easily at school will have done. It might be as simple as some practical neutral advice about how she could learn those skills and make some friends as it sounds like she is OK with other aspects of her college life, like the subject and the work.

Please don't make her feel she has to stay at Oxford for "the prestige". Even if it was going to give her a long term advantage in life, it wouldn't be worth it. And I'm honestly not sure it gives that clear advantage to most students these days: many employers are aiming to diversify their hires. And certainly a happy, confident young person is likely to do better than a stressed, unhappy one.

Having said that, there is no guarantee that she would be happier if she moved. She's almost at the end of the year now. Unless she is really at crisis point, she just needs to hang on for a few more weeks and then over the summer she will have a bit of time to reflect with a bit more distance from the immediate situation. Once you spend more time with her, you'll be able to get a better sense of the situation and whether things are really as bad as her intermittent phone calls suggest.

@Walkaround Like the rowing advice! If these things are not proving fertile ground for friends, it’s very difficult.

Are there parties at Oxford? Or going to a pub or club (although many have closed)? Do any dc there go out with friends and invite others?

Not sure if you’re being serious, @MeetMeOnTheCorner? (It’s a long thread and I can’t recall if you’ve commented before.)

Every college has its own college bar and, being a city, Oxford has plenty of pubs and nightclubs. Every college also has a JCR (Junior Common Room) which is a space in which students can socialise and organise college-wide parties, not to mention the dining halls where students eat together. Colleges also generally have their own sports facilities, music facilities, college chapels, etc, so these are also places students can meet up with each other in college. Being a collegiate university, Oxford has far more venues in which students can socialise with other students than the vast majority of other universities. You are not, as a student, banned from visiting other college bars with friends, either, so not stuck in your own college if you don’t want to be. University venues, rather than college ones, tend to be based more around sport, debating, music, academia, etc, rather than being bigger versions of what each college already has on offer socially.

I suspect the above fact is accentuating the OP’s dd’s sense of friendlessness, because she doesn’t feel confident to visit these college venues on her own in the expectation she will be able to strike up a conversation with any groups of people already in there, so might be hearing others having fun metres from her own bedroom, but feel unable to join in and take part. I would be very surprised if the social venues in her college are empty, or that nobody at her college ever goes clubbing or to a pub, she just hasn’t worked out how to get access to the groups who are doing these things and, after the organised activities of Freshers’ week, clearly found invitations dried up before she had established enough of a connection with anyone to be on their radar. If you have never had difficulty making friends before, it can be crushing to realise that sometimes you can be unlucky and things don’t happen spontaneously and naturally in the way you expected, particularly when theoretically it should all be so easy, because your entire college year group are all living and eating and able to socialise in the same small geographical space.

I think Oxford students would often go to college bars or bars linked to the university as they are subsidised. I think you need someone from another college to be able to get into another college bar mostly but at a large college I would be pretty confident there will be people in her college bar.

People do go to the pub and clubs but its not a place where they would do this every night normally. Also a lot of students will be on limited budgets and maybe have £100 a week to spend for everything so asking them to go out for a £50 night out they may say no as can't afford it but not want to say that. So suggesting somewhere cheaper to go may be more likely to get takers.

When I was at Cambridge there were lots of room parties but looks now like those at Oxford need permission from the college if over a certain number like 10 people and there are rules and fines around them. You could also hire a room for a party but that was for wealthier students. People also tend to either invite people out or go out in an interest group, interest groups will often have social events but some are more social than others. I would just do the interests she's interested in.

I would see how she is over the summer and see whether its a deep depression or just a my friends have a better life than mine on Instagram type issue. Its normal to have ups and downs and the vast majority make it through fine and its good she is telling you and you learn through it. But if she is really depressed then I would consider changing universities or courses but may require starting again in year 1 and I would not take that option lightly. You could have the same issues again. If its more an envy thing I would push back a little like my DD would say the private school people on my course can go on 4 longhaul holidays a year and eat in restaurants all the time. And my reply to that was yes and there are other people who can't afford any holidays or enough food and some of them where at your school. She moved on pretty fast.

I found the easiest people to make friends with where people at my college on my course initially and then you linked in sometimes to each others friends. Then after that societies and interest groups, it gives you a common interest to talk around. Politics had a lot of history students and used to have dinners and events.

There also seems to be a private members club called The Gridiron which now takes men and women and will be public school dominated if she's looking for people similar to at school. I don't know anything about it but was looking for equivalent of Pitt Club in Cambridge.

The obvious general social event for this time of year if money is not an issue are the balls - Oriel one maybe as its 700th anniversary year or ask others what they are going to. Don't know if they are still selling tickets.

I think some of the people who made v tight friendship groups right away were those who hadn’t had many friends at school.

Also in my experience there was a lot of shuffling between first and second year and during the second year. My closest friends from that time now I barely even knew in the first year. She’ll be ok.

OP, what does your daughter enjoy doing? Is she keeping up with her interests?

Does she have a clear sense of the kind of people she likes to be around, and who 'get' her?

Another possibility is that she's missing a very close friend or had a bad breakup. Some 'college couples' form very quickly after arrival, then crumble later in the year at a point when friendship groups are more settled, people busy with studying, and when it's harder to get to know people from scratch.

i think the problem is partially that she hasn’t really got many niche interests which translate into societies. She’s obviously very academic and interested in her subject, then apart from that she is into journalism as I mentioned and will try out some drama, but to be honest except for that most of her time at school and out of school was spent with friends

History has lots of offshoots though - social history, cultural history, literary history, art & architectural history, history of science and medicine, history of philosophy, archeology, anthropology, genealogical research etc.

What were her other A levels? Does she speak a language?

Do you really think I was passionately interested in canals when I handed my £7 or whatever it was to the Canal Soc rep in Freshers Week circa 1980-something?😂 Joining a club or society isn’t any sort of commitment or statement of undying love. It’s simply a way of meeting new people and getting involved - sometimes for no more than a couple of hours in total - in something that might possibly prove entertaining.

Obviously I’m no good example - but perhaps she needs to try being a little less rigid in her thinking? Can she not just relax and try to have some fun, rather than constantly stressing about not being part of a gang?

Once again I’d question whether she’s really old enough (chronologically and emotionally) to get the most from her time there right now.

Oh, @MyPearlPoster - I’m writing this sitting on the riverside in Christ Church Meadow and two boats full of young female rowers have just passed by. They definitely looked like beginners …