Good Times

Introduction
Got into Oxford and it was, I mean it was exactly what I imagined a campus to be like. But previously when we were riding up, I was with my parents and “I don’t know if I want to go here, look at these corn fields, what are we going to do?” But got into town and it was great. It’s picturesque, exactly what I imagined a campus to be like.

Preppy. Really preppy kids. They call it J.Crew U for a reason. Everyone’s wearing the same clothes. Everyone’s from the same type of background, but a lot of us like it for that reason…it’s pretty much J.Crew U, all the way.

Campus Life and Social Life
Professors are there. You know, you have to go when their office hours are. You can always catch them in the office hours, they’re always there.

TA’s are great. We have them, they’re called like SI instructors. So these SI instructors, they’re just students. We don’t have many TA’s that are grad students that work here. But the SI’s are great because they’ve already taken the course and actually Calc 2, one of the hardest courses at Miami, literally, I only got through it because of the SI instructor.

Countless hours, it’s not extra money to go to it. It’s included in the class, in the course fee. Day before a test we would study for 4 or 5 hours and this SI instructor would be there the whole time.
Miami Plan is, it goes both ways, I don’t really like it because when I came into college, I knew what I wanted to do so taking these Miami Plan courses was difficult. I was taking an American Studies course and it’s just a Miami Plan. It was AMS, you know American Studies 101. It was supposed to be an easy A, but the problem is, you’ve got these diff courses you’re taking in different departments.

The way I saw it should have been was, they should be selling you their department because the Miami Plan is really good for kids that don’t know what they want to do. But for other students I know, don’t know exactly what they want to do, they’re kind of still bouncing around with their ideas, they like it because they definitely get a variety of courses and they can explore them. My opinion, if you know what you want to do, then the Miami Plan inhibits that. At the same time, it has a positive, because you get to meet kids that are outside of your major. That’s probably the #1 thing. You get to meet kids from all different majors. Advertisement
Academics
The Dorm life is great. I can’t even imagine what school would have been like without living in the dorm the freshman year. It’s definitely the easiest way to meet people. Everybody usually has their doors open. They prop their doors open; people are playing video games, drinking, whatever, just partying.

The university tries to pick out RA’s that have that friendship relationship as opposed to the authority relationship. So with that, you develop a good rapport with all the kids that live in your corridor area and I mean, you’re friends with these kids throughout the next 4 years.

The kids that are in your corridor, you usually go and you rush the same fraternities. Same thing with girls, girls that are in the same corridor, they all—it’s funny, you walk down a corridor and all the girls will be in the same sorority.

The dorms are small, I mean it’s tough you got to, you have to really manage space well. They’re not air-conditioned, most of them. There are maybe 2 that are air-conditioned, so that’s rough first few months of school, you’re not sleeping under any covers.

You’re sharing a bathroom with 20 other people, I mean, it’s an experience.

Food’s amazing. I can’t stuff my face fast enough, it’s great. We go to “the hottest place”- they call it Bell Tower. And in between lunch you’ll go, sometimes they’ll have a band set up and there’s a band playing outside or some sort of activity. You go in and they stir-fry your food right in front of you so it’s all pretty fresh, they cook a hamburger for you, pizza, totally an entire variety for you of food.

I mean it’s better than home cooking.

Food’s amazing. It’s all you can eat, it’s buffet style. You want 10 pieces of pizza, it’s all you. You want one piece, fine. It’s all the same price. You swipe your card, you go in and you can eat hamburgers, fries, hot dogs, whatever you want.

Freshman year, it’s pretty much a challenge to see how many people can you make out with? You come home from maybe the uptown scene, the bars and you’re just staying in the same building as other girls, I mean, it gets pretty crazy.

Student Body
When you get older, junior, senior you settle down, you have a girlfriend or something like that. But usually freshman, sophomore year it’s—nobody’s in relationships, nobody goes on dates. It’s not like that. It’s more like “Hey, we’re having a party, come over and hang out and we’ll drink some beer go uptown later to the bars have a good time, it’s not really like, “Hey, you wanna go on a date?”

Where you’ll get caught with the fake ID—a lot of my friends have gotten caught with them, you get arrested for public intoxication, so you get arrested that’s fine, you get arrested for that, but then they go through your wallet and they find the fake ID. That’s were the big thing is. So, if you’re going to have a fake ID you have to be smart about it. Don’t want to keep it in your wallet, you probably want to keep it in another pocket or I’ve heard kids, if they feel like they’re going to get in trouble, the cops come to a party, they’ll even put their fake ID in their sock or something or just throw it. The bars, they catch you they’ll take the ID, they’ll keep it.

I’ve been here 3 years, I’ve run into kids smoking pot once. I mean it’s a huge drinking, I mean binge drinking to the extreme and that’s pretty much the scene. I’ve heard of underlying people that they are into drugs, they’re into doing coke or that kind of thing. I’ve never run into them, it’s a very small tight-niched community that’s into the heavier drugs, but everybody is huge into binge drinking.

If I were parent sending my kid to college, I’d much rather send them to a school where there’s going to be heavy drinking than a school where there’s kids smoking a lot of pot or something like that. Not that either one is worse than the other, but one is definitely more acceptable in society than smoking pot.

I got involved with the Greek System freshman year, I fell into that whole rushing fraternity thing. It didn’t work out. I didn’t really. You know it wasn’t my thing having someone order me around and tell me this and that. I got really heavily involved in student government…both student government and Greek organizations they take big leadership roles here on campus.

With the #’s on campus here of the Greek system, they are declining, they’ve gone down a lot in the last years. This year, some of the sororities, they couldn’t even meet their quota.

The Greek scene, they’re really important for the atmosphere here. They’re mostly their social, they’re all social. They have great parties, they have bands play at their houses and you know, it’s a good time, you can easily meet people at these parties. The parties are open. A lot of the fraternity parties are come as you want, bring as many people as you want. The more people the better for them. It makes their fraternity look really good.

But the scene is mostly for kids that are freshman, sophomores because they can’t quite drink at the bars yet it’s kind of during that awkward phase still like trying to figure out where they’re going to fit in. And they can easily, legally, sort of “legally,” drink at the fraternity houses. It’s an easy venue for them to not get in trouble, it’s pretty safe.

In Closing...
We’re literally what I call “fair weather fans.” Like if it’s nice outside, we’ll go to the football game. If it’s not nice outside, we won’t go.

The most popular sport I’ve seen, at least, maybe not the most popular one, but the one that has the most school spirit is hockey. I mean, we’re building this unbelievably new Ice Arena. It’ll be ready in the fall and hockey it’s huge. The kids, we all get into it, all the students, we have cheers for it, we don’t really have any football cheers. If we do have them, we stole them from other schools.

And since our big star Ben Rothesberger, since he left football’s definitely gone downhill. We don’t really go to the games that much. Basketball, I’ve never been to a basketball game. I’m a huge basketball fan, I love watching basketball, I’ve never been to a game here though. If you’re into sports, and you’re really into the big-time sports, this isn’t the school for you.