The Crucible

Mental illness and brilliance have long been associated with each other, in social belief if nothing else. The 'mad genius' is a literary trope going back centuries. A fair number of studies have focused on the high prevalence of mental illness in people with high intelligence.

Oxford scholar Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote the first medical text on clinical depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Mental illnesses continue to be a major topic of research at Oxford, and I suspect that part of the large academic interest in them is because so many researchers here suffer from them. I think I know more people who have diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illnesses here than I do people who do not. And people who fall somewhere on the spectrum -- for example, they experience high anxiety and have had panic attacks, but not at a frequency that constitutes an illness. And, as these are invisible disabilities, there is no doubt in my mind that a fair few more people I know suffer from them that I don't know about.

Autism. Anxiety disorder. Bipolar disorder. Clinical depression. OCD. Tourette's. These are the most common amongst my colleagues, though a number of other illnesses affect those around me. And a top-tier, highly competitive environment breeds the sort of situations that exacerbate the symptoms of these illnesses.

The silver lining to this is that, as living with mental illnesses (your own or your friends') is such a prevalent part of everyday life here, I find my college's graduate student body* to have created, by and large, one of the most non-judgemental cultures for people with mental illnesses that I have ever encountered. I wish I could transplant that open-mindedness and sensitivity to the other places I live and travel.


*The administrative departments, however, have an infuriatingly long way to go. 

Small Talk

It is interview season here, a time when all the young high school hopefuls have to come sit exams and be interviewed by the fellows of colleges in hopes of being granted an offer to attend Oxford for their undergraduate degree.

From a previous year's interview in the physics department:

Fellow: "So, do you have any hobbies?"
Interviewee: "Prime numbers."


Yep, that kid got an offer.

The Skittle Observation

I've decided to take this blog in a slightly different direction. While I am still having occasional adventures, mostly what I do every day of every week involves sitting in a library, leaving me little to post here of castle ruins or trips to continental cities (yay grad school!). Then I realized that simply being at Oxford is its own adventure. The fascinating and delightful discoveries I make usually come from the people here, not the architecture. So I am going to start recording some snippets of the people who make up the Oxford experience.

Lewis Carroll, a mathematician at Christ Church College who wrote Alice in Wonderland, based several elements of his book on people and things in Oxford. In no other place have I found this quotation more true: 'You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret: all the best people are.' And at Oxford, we're all mad here.*

My first confirmation that I had found my people came to me as I was sitting in the college bar one day in my first months here. It came in the form of Skittles. The bar, you see, sells a small variety of chips (crisps) and candy in addition to a sizable variety of alcoholic beverages (more on unhealthy academic coping mechanisms later). How do you eat Skittles? Most of the people I know back home take a small handful, pop them all in their mouth, and chew. Repeat.

Not at Oxford. As I sat there scanning the room, I noticed that every single person who had purchased Skittles had a different and very precise sorting method. The most commonly preferred method is to sort them out by color, line each color up in single-file parallel lines along the desk, eat off the extras until you have the same number of each color, and then consume them in groups of five (one of each color, but only one color at a time in your mouth) from red to purple in the order of the visible light spectrum. That obsession with detail, that need to sort and classify, is not something that we can turn on for schoolwork or research and turn off when going about our daily lives; it's how our brains process the things around us -- even the little things. It's not a 'oh, there's that one person who weirdly over-sorts their Skittles'. Here, we all are the kids who got teased at school for sorting our Skittles.






*This is an ableist statement, but I hope you'll forgive me. Mental health in Oxford is an important topic that I cannot hope to cover in a single blog post.

Hard at Work ... and Sometimes Not

Hi all,

I realize it's been a year since I've posted, and I am sincerely sorry about that. What can I say, PhD life. I will try to catch up as quickly as possible. When I haven't been working, I have been out doing some pretty amazing things.

And now that I have just gone on about how much PhD students work (N.B. in Oxford, because we have to be different, we say DPhil students instead of PhDs), I want to spend a little time talking about how we Oxonians procrastinate. Not that I ever do that. Really. Ever. (⸮)

One of the many things that has struck me about Oxford students is not that we occasionally procrastinate (because everyone does that) but how we procrastinate. For example, think about the usual ways people procrastinate:

• Watch Netflix
• Clean the house ... again
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
• Get one more cup of coffee
• Play Tetris
• Bake

Ways in which Oxford DPhil students have actually procrastinated:

• Learn Morse code ... in an afternoon.
• Realize that you know very little about Stoicism. Proceed to read the works of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius instead of just looking up the basics on Wikipedia.
• Take up knitting, crocheting, or embroidery.
• Learn how to make balloon animals. 
• Build a computer.
• Set about finding the fastest, most efficient way of solving a Rubik's cube.
• Write up a new computer program for computational geneticists, and then sell it off for a fair chunk of 'pints at the pub' money. Just for funsies. 
• Take a weekend off to hike the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. For 'research purposes', of course.
• Decide to come as Sabriel from Garth Nix's books to our next MCR bop. Instead of buying an in-the-bag costume from the local party shop, you sew and embellish your own tunic, create armored leggings, and mold your own bells out of urethane plastic casting resin. 
• Watch a documentary on the textile industry in 18th century Russia. Or Georgian home security systems. Or early 19th century bread baking. No, this is not remotely connected to your thesis. You were just curious.
• Researching the format and recommended texts for the mathematical tripos at Cambridge

And the kicker: my friend reported that in high school, he took up three extra exams during his A-levels (the equivalent to US AP subject exams) to procrastinate on studying for his other ones. He then proceeded to point out that by asking a few of my friends to tell me some of their procrastination stories, we were 'procrastinating by trying to remember all the ways we procrastinate so that [I] can procrastinate by forming a list of all our procrastination strategies.'

For a humorous and accurate article on thesis procrastination, check out this article from The Toast.