Often, that's good to hear about your DD at last and good timing too! I hope she can celebrate and that nobody else tests positive. I also hope that her college have been supportive, as it must have been incredibly difficult for her to have two consecutive stints in isolation. She really deserves a brilliant birthday tomorrow.
DS2 continues to have a brilliant time on every level at O! It's everything he dreamed of - academically/intellectually and socially and I'm very pleased for him. He's made some very good friends and meets up with a variety of people most days - outside of course - to chat, go for walks, have takeaway lunch or coffee. So many people share his wider interests and enthusiasm for his subject too and he's taken up several activities that make him feel a core part of his college and of Oxford.
DS1 (C) is also still happy enough but still not getting any chance at all to meet like-minded people and often spending days without talking much to anyone at all. This is my most sociable DC too who had lots of friends at school and is never at a loss for things to say!
He occasionally socialises with his household but all they want to do is play card games late at night and talk about gaming and he's never ever been into gaming. It's really not his thing at all and I don't think he's even ever played a computer game.
He hears about his brother having long walks with friends, discussing everything from future careers, politics, literature, philosophy and history etc - or people just sharing more interesting stuff about their lives and I'm sure he feels envious, although he's very happy that his brother has found so many like-minded people.
Nobody that he's met so far in his college seems at all interested in anything other than the most superficial things and there's no sense of an 'arts and humanities' group that he can tap into along his corridor or in his household.
I'm trying to think of things he can do next term to meet more people but there just seem to be no opportunities and his college feels like an anonymous, sprawling campus where most people hide away in their rooms, largely nocturnal, occasionally emerging in the early hours of the morning to shriek and crash around in the corridors before retreating back again! (My words, not his, I hasten to add!).
There are about 40 to 50 people on each corridor/floor and from what he's heard, a faction seem to do a lot of their socialising around 3am to 4am - involving lots of alcohol and recreational 'substances'. But surely that can't be the only way people meet others at Cambridge? As he's not into that kind of thing at all, he's got a limited group with whom he can socialise and they still only want to do gaming and cards which he's not into either.
If things are still all online again next term and people still just take their plastic trays of food to their rooms and eat alone, I don't know how he or anyone else can find their 'tribe'. He gets out for solo walks and goes to a library outside of college to work, which is good but beyond that, he's meeting no one at all on his wavelength.
His supervisions seem to be just general 'chat' about a text rather than the 'cut and thrust', intellectually challenging discussions he'd expected and unlike for his brother, no one at all seem interested enough in their subject to want to talk about it outside of supervision - ever. He's still waiting to have half of all his term's essays even marked and I'm struggling to understand why it's all so very different from what he'd expected and from my own experiences of Oxbridge.
Each week, his brother has several lengthy and difficult texts to read, disseminate and then put together in a way that answers an essay question. His tutorial last for around 1.5 hours and really pushes him to think further, defend his argument and enjoy going deeper into the essay question.
DS1 (C) usually has one single text and only needs to express some generic ideas and themes about this in a one hour supervision, where his co-supervisee also does the same. There's no sense of being pushed intellectually and no essay around which the supervision focuses.
The only people he's met who he feels are on his wavelength are all outside his college and all his societies/clubs effectively shut down when we went into another lockdown. I hope next term will be better
and he's worked out a way to manage well within these limits but it's not what he expected and still like being on a completely different planet to his brother at Oxford.