Growing up in a quaint suburban town of central New Jersey, I had always dreamed of escaping the monotonous lifestyle of living down the street from a giant cornfield. The most lively part of town was our municipal library, and it was impossible to do anything remotely fun without owning a car; by my senior year, I was adamant in attending a large college set within the heart of a booming city.
You’re probably wondering — how did such a dream culminate in my decision to attend Oxford College, a rural Georgian university whose student population totals to a whopping nine hundred and ninety-nine students?
On most groggy weekday mornings, I also find myself asking the same question. Despite the lack of liveliness Oxford offers in comparison to larger universities, Oxford’s five-minute walking campus and boarding-school-esque aura does offer its benefits.
In particular, people care about you.
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As a die-hard introvert, my largest anxieties in beginning college revolved around my social acclimation. Although I’ve only been at Oxford for a few months, I know that I will always be able to wave to a familiar face while walking across the quad, studying at the library at the crack of dawn, or munching on one of Lils’ cookie brownies at 3:30pm; I don’t think many students at larger schools can say the same.
Last weekend, for example, my WGS class ate dinner at our professor’s home in Atlanta before attending a seminar led by Bryan Stevenson. We pet our professor’s dog named Zach, learned that she had adopted and raised two children from Peru, and chuckled when our suspicions that she would have a Stacey Abraham’s sign planted in her front yard were confirmed.
This week, one of my student instructors approached me in the dining hall to compliment me on the points I made during our class discussion, as she is aware of the anxiety I associate with participating in front of all my peers. Just yesterday, I spent over half an hour in my chemistry professor’s office, learning not only more about the course content, but also about how his husband is in training for a marathon.
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It’s oddly comforting to know that while going through such large changes — ie: being more than eight hundred miles away from home, struggling to prioritize my time and draw up plans to achieve my goals — that I am surrounded by people who care about my well-being.
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I won’t lie — the transition between feeling claustrophobic growing up in a small suburban town to experiencing the “best four years of my life” in an even smaller town has not been easy; I’m still trying to figure out quite a few things about Oxford myself. However, I doubt that I’d find the same sense of belonging if I chose to attend my state university. So, future freshmen of Oxford: give it a chance. Our “game days” might consist of being one of four speculators for our tennis games and our weekends might look like the entire student body has flocked to Atlanta, however, I can whole-heartedly say that Oxford offers a sense of community like no other.