On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’
The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’
What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the pre-Christmas week of ‘fun’ I had lost the will to live, let alone make Chemistry-themed paper-chains. But you could spend three sleep-deprived years at Oxford without doing a degree at all.
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