Current Oxbridge students - continued again...!

[Panicmode1]

Think the other thread is full....!

@UniversityQQuestions A very good question. I had one DC graduate last year and one has just finished 2nd Year. DC1 took about a year to settle - they'd had an incredibly intense year out between school and uni doing highly demanding humanitarian work. To him Oxford seemed a bit childish and very much a goldfish bowl of privilege so they went into a bit of a low. In the 2nd year they did settle well into their degree; got a girlfriend loved their modules, made some good friends, enjoyed rowing and now has a relevant and responsible job.

DC2 is having a complete ball (also Oxford) - loves their subject and rows a huge amount. Has great friends. Very much a work hard, play hard mentality. They also had a year out but is wired differently.

DD loved it. She isn’t fazed by exams and aimed to do “just enough “ work to succeed without compromising her other interests. It just really worked for her.
DS tends towards perfectionism so he found Cambridge hard at times. He is now doing a Master’s degree alongside working full-time and says it’s a breeze compared with his first degree.

If dd gets required grades at A Level she will hopefully be off to Oxford in October and we have to fill in her finance form this weekend. Has anyone got any advice on finances at university? She will get student loan for tuition and we are going to help with accommodation. She will get a part time job in the holidays, but we have been told that it is hard to find part time jobs at Oxford and that it isn’t advisable in their first term anyway while they adjust to the work load?
How much do they need to live on? Her college has suggested £125 per week on food. Their other suggested expenses, eg travel (where?), societies, books etc add up to over £250 a week which seems an awful lot when it doesn’t include accommodation. What will be her other living expenses?
And how do you organise an allowance… eg do you pay a sum a week, a month, or a lump sum for the term? Do you carry on during the holidays and does the amount get reduced?
We were thinking lump sum that she has to eke out over the term and then a reduced sum in the holidays while we work out how much holiday university work she has to do and how many hours she can realistically work at a job over the holidays. Any advice very gratefully received and I appreciate it is an awkward subject so please dm me if that is better. Huge thanks.

@IndecisionsIndecisions have sent you a PM. Those figures v high compared to DS at C

Costs vary from college to college and whether they are fully catered or not. We paid DD's accommodation and any other college costs. She lived off the minimum maintenance loan. She had the odd shift at open days etc to give her some extra cash.

You will find that different colleges pay for different things. DD received back 50% of all costs relating to playing tennis for the uni, including training overseas and kit. Others had books reimbursed or grants for language courses in other colleges.

Ds got the Cambridge bursary for 2 years because I had what the university considered to be a low income, and I didn’t really pay a penny, though it helped that he got lucrative jobs in the long vacation (frankly there was too much work for him to get paid jobs in the other vacs). I’d assume Oxford has something similar though you need to have a household income below about £70k to benefit. In the last year after dp and I had moved in together I just paid him a lump sum in September. But ds is fairly used to managing money and is very cautious plus we’d done a budget spreadsheet together before leaving home. If id had to give him money when he was younger I’d probably have replicated the way I got money as a student and would have given him a ‘grant’ per term.

That's really interesting @PermanentTemporary - I didn't know they existed and as DH is still not working, our household income is suffering somewhat. We applied for our two uni students to get a full maintenance loan this year but it's based on last year's income so they've both just been given the minimum - I think we can reapply for a reassessment of household income - we haven't done that as we were really hoping he'd have a job by now, but here we still are a year later....!

@IndecisionsIndecisions DS at C lives really frugally - we have basically paid his college bill each term (about £2k) and then he lives off his maintenance loan (we have only got the minimum - £4k ish?) and he manages well. However, he self caters as with his timetable, he rarely gets back in time for meals in college. He doesn't have time to work in term time (STEM subject) so tries to work in the holidays - but usually only the summer. Christmas and Easter are spent catching up and preparing for the next term. He does a bit of tutoring when he's home. We pay for his occasional train trips home and his phone, but other than that he manages - but he's not a huge party animal. My daughter (Nottingham) is out far more - but she works during term time so although we do the same for her in terms of paying her rent and she lives off the loan - she supplements her income well.

@Panicmode1 hope things improve for you soon. DD's college also have bursaries and discounted accomodation, book grants, travel grants, equipment grants, so always worth checking.

@IndecisionsIndecisions DD's accomodation (C) is cheaper than any of her friends at other universities due to the short terms and she gets three years in her college. After paying for accomodation and her phone bill she gets £125 a week during term time which includes food (they have a buttery and good cooking facilities so she buys some food in college and some cooking herself, due to drama committments she is often out at buttery opening times), going out, travel, theatre tickets (she does a LOT of amateur theatre) clothes and £50 during holidays. The fees have been held at what they started out at rather than gone up to the new amount.

Most of the societies DD is part of are free, her BF who just graduated did rowing and his college had a fund for equipment. Formal dinners are about £13 and she goes to about one a term, she could go to more but doesn't. I have paid for the odd extra like a college ball ticket, her college ball is £55, but she got invited to the Trinity May ball and that was £260 iirc and we could afford it so we got her the ticket. She managed to save enough to have a few days away with a friend at the end of term.

She does some tutoring in the holidays and last summer did tour guiding. £125 for food plus £250 for extras every week sounds like a lot to me but you do get a wide range of economic backgrounds at Oxbridge.

Oh yes, forgot May Ball tickets (£300 - with dining) this year for DS and £150 for the white tie hire 😱- he paid for most of it, but we did help him out.....!

@IndecisionsIndecisions part time jobs during term time aren’t really allowed at Oxford (except with a very few exceptions like being paid to help at outreach events) - the terms are only 8 weeks long and very intense. Part time jobs in the vacation are absolutely normal of course:

Similar figures with our DS at C. He lives off the grant, we meet accommodation and related costs. He usually self caters with occasional recourse to the college buttery and we pick that up as well. Course work and preparation means that we support him in holidays and we did that as well for summer last year. He is working part-time at the moment as he is returning for his Master's in October. He was offered an internship at GCHQ but that was contingent on direct vetting and that included submittal of up to date bank savings statements which he left to the last minute (familiar?) and didn't manage to obtain.

Dd is just about to graduate from Oxford and her weekly living costs were well below those quoted in the message above. She was lucky enough to be in a college with accommodation for all years of her degree, so never had to find private rented accommodation and also, as others have said, only had to pay accommodation fees during term time. Her two siblings were/are at other universities and paid considerably more for their accommodation after first year as they had to pay all year round. We paid DD’s accommodation costs and she got the lowest maintenance amount, from which she paid all her other costs, but also managed to save a fair bit. She wasn’t involved in any societies with high costs and isn’t much of a drinker/party-goer which was helpful from the point of view of stretching out her maintenance loan. She probably spent in the region of £50-60 per week on food, but mainly self-catered in the small but adequate kitchen with the occasional meal (maybe once or twice a fortnight) in the college dining hall. Most of her course materials were online, or she was able to borrow from the college library so she spent very little on books, and those she did buy, she was mostly able to get second-hand from the Oxfam bookshop in Oxford. She didn’t work during term time (definitely no time for that!) but worked every holiday apart from Easter this year which she spent solidly revising for finals. As others have said, some colleges have generous bursaries/grants towards books and travel (St Johns in Oxford is one of the most generous), and Oxford also has the Crankstart scholarship for those on relatively low household incomes.

DD has provisionally passed her PhD with "very very" minor corrections. I am really proud of her. If you know me in RL, please keep it to yourself for now.

I think I will have to keep this wonderful supportive thread on read-only now as I transition to the dark side.

Best of luck to all of you and your fabulous DC and thanks for sharing the journey with me.

Absolutely wonderful achievement Malbec. Will keep it strictly to myself and no doubt I’ll be informed by DS4 in due course :) Huge congrats!

Amazing achievement @Malbecfan, I am in awe.

I am back at ‘school’ doing a level 4 AI apprenticeship alongside the day job and really enjoying studying again. As a post-menopausal woman who has suffered from brain fog I have found it affirming to know I can still learn very very new concepts and can apply my learning to my job. First month of 15-18 months under my belt so far, I even have my student card! I was also persuaded by my publisher to do a new edition of a technical book I wrote 20 years ago - deadline next spring. All on top of quite a lot of volunteering and time on admin for DH’s business, oh and a full time job. Overwhelmed isn’t the word but I feel like a surfer on an enormous wave which will crash at any moment…

Wow @PettsWoodParadise that's seriously impressive. I have managed a team this year where 40% of it was new to the qualification and I nearly throttled one of them. My Line Manager has been awesome and the new HoD in my other department has been brilliant but it has been a roller-coaster of a year. I'm taking a couple of weeks off as my sister will be caring for my dad and I need a change of scene.

In other news, I teach a few kids as a peri music teacher. A very good 15 year old took grade 8 on Tuesday and I heard today that he achieved a distinction, so it's been a really good day. Downhill from now I guess....

Excellent news! Well done to her and to you for the hard work and effort that lies behind that achievement. Good luck for the future for all of you.

Fantastic achievement, many congratulations to her!

@Juja would you mind if i sent you a PM about rowing?

@RowingQuery please do PM - I’ll do my best to answer it!

@Malbecfan all congratulations to your DD on her achievement.

@Malbecfan Many congratulations - what I relief - I think the night before my PhD viva was one of the most challenging - sounds as though they'd done a super job on their thesis.

lol @Juja I proof read the introduction and conclusion so am taking maximum credit for everything - yes I did fine one typo

Very excited that DS1 is going up to C this year! His results are earlier than A-levels so we already know, but I guess I’m just the first of the new intake hopping into this thread. Hope you don’t mind me bursting in with a question straightaway. Mine is: does he need a suit? And a dinner suit for black tie? Back in my day boys did get quite a lot of use out of them, but perhaps things are more relaxed now.

Congratulations to your ds Dunnet! My ds got a lot of use out of his charity shop black suit at various student events starting with matriculation dinner, though that was partly due to the number of funerals we had in 3 years. He hired a DJ once for a first year ball, and then got one of those in a charity shop too, though in his final year he only went to events not balls. So my vote would be yes. He has had to actively avoid suits for interviews and work as he read CompSci. I chose to give him a fancier suit for his 21st birthday because at bottom I’m an 80s teenager, but tbh I’ll be amazed if he wears it much outside friends’ weddings. So in summary my view would be ‘helpful to have one but try not to spend a lot’.