#cantabrigia

alright well i could talk about this for hours (as anyone who went to high school with me can attest) but i’ll try not to ramble too much

i think we first need to emphasise that, compared to hampden, oxford and cambridge are old. it’s impossible to forget, especially in oxford, which is all grand conformity in sandstone, could’ve all been built at once — oxford, which held king charles i’s court during the civil war; oxford, where england’s first parliament was held. the place has always been tied up with power. in 1096, so the legend goes, alfred the great founded it, and even if we just look at confirmed dates, it rose to power as early as 1167, when henry ii called back all his scholars from paris. nobody was escaping anything here.

and then you have cambridge — cambridge, a refuge from the bitter, violent town-gown fights that in 1209 led to the deaths of two oxford scholars. a market town. and you can tell, if you look. the fens didn’t have a lot of stone so they imported it from anywhere they could; the colleges are more spread apart than in the other place. there’s still a market square.

and it’s grown away from that, now — 600 years of holding a duopoly over english university education made it easy to forget — and so it became oxford’s counterpart, the Other Place, the rival and the twin. the stereotype is that you go to oxford for the arts and cambridge for the sciences, and again, you can see it in the buildings, especially in their libraries: oxford’s form versus cambridge’s function. oxford’s charles — his court was held there during the civil war — versus cambridge’s cromwell.

and that epitomises the differences between the two, i think. oxford nowadays seems far more concerned with tradition and old glory and wearing sub fusc to exams. cambridge — despite turning out extremely similar graduates — feels less unapologetically grand.

what ho, anon! don’t worry, it’s definitely a confusing system if you’re not used to it.

right, the word “college” has different implications than it does in the us (or even a fair bit of the uk, haha)! they’re like your avg college, in that you’ll do a lot of your learning there, but again, they make up the entire university. there’s no studying at oxbridge without belonging to a college.

honestly, for lit or philosophy, you’re good for pretty much any you choose — you’ll be doing the same course whichever college you go to, so you also want to look at what the place is like, the size of it (trinity hall, cambridge is tiny; st john’s is enormous), the reputation to some extent (which i can’t help you with, unfortunately — i know @artauds is at oxford and @oephelia went to cambridge, though, so maybe they’ll be able to help). and yes, you do choose which college to apply to, though that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily go to that one. in december, both universities conduct interviews, all of which are held within the colleges, but it’s far from unheard of to receive an offer from a college different from the one you applied for!

the topics don’t really have anything to do with each other, but when i was a lot younger, i was obsessed with personifying everything, and since one of my main interests was oxbridge, the two sort of combined — i ended up thinking about how i’d personify various universities. don’t worry, there’s no link you’re missing there, they’re just two things i’m interested in.