0th Week: Discovering Fourth-year Minotaur Syndrome: half fresher, half finalist.

  0th week is officially over, and oh what a week it's been. There have already been so many highs and lows that I'm a little afraid to imagine what emotions the next 8 weeks will hold.

  The first half of the week was spent in a state of what can only be described as pure anxiety: worrying about what my timetable would look like this term, what my new tutors would be like, who would be in my new seminars and, of course, trying to get my head around my new status in college. You see as a fourth year finalist, not only do you feel incredibly old, but you also feel kind of lonely. I remember when I was a fresher seeing fourth years linguists around and treating them with a kind of timid respect, admiring them only from afar as they tottered to and from the library and never quite feeling that could even dare to approach them. They were almost supernatural beings to me. Now that I'm actually a fourth year myself though, I realize how ridiculous that was. 

  Being a fourth year linguist is just an extremely weird state of being. You come back from your abroad and most of your friends have gone. Not only do you not know this years freshers, but the second years (who now walk around like they know the show - and quite rightly so too) are also all strangers to you. You recognize the third years, but don't really know any of them all that well, bar a few that you met through various events in second year. So actually, you feel pretty out of the loop. And even though you might expect to feel like a year 11 student at high school, the reality is that you kind of feel like a first year, but with an odd twist given that you have already been in college for two years. Just as you had got used to everything being one way, you suddenly return to find it in completely another. The only analogy I can think of to best explain it, is that it's like walking into your family home, only to find new people living in it. You feel a bit like an outsider looking in. Except you're not an outsider, in fact you're still very much IN it. Only your role has changed. Instead of being the wild teenage youngest child, you're now the no-nonsense eldest-sister with end-of-school exams to focus on. 

 All of this means that, although you know you should focus on work, you can't help but feel the necessity to meet all of the new people in the college. Essentially, you're no different to the freshers; like them, you too have to go through all of the introductory small talk, and meet as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, so that hopefully, eventually, you will be able to walk through college and actually feel part of it again. Of course, you don't really have to do this. You could just screw it and decide you don't care about meeting anybody and just go to the library do your work, go home, chat to your three house mates and repeat this routine every day for the next 8 weeks and then again in Hilary and again in Trinity term, until finally you sit your exams and then have to learn how to interact with unknown human beings again after that. But me being me, I know I couldn't do that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my work would actually probably suffer if I did. Already, after just one week of revising for collections every day I was starting to get restless. It's just not sustainable. I think it's super important to try and keep a balance. Just because we're fourth years doesn't mean we need to become hermits and close ourselves in the cupboard with books for the next 8 months. We could do that for the last 3 months maybe, but if we started now we would never be able to keep it up. As a result, we are forced to adapt and transform into what I can only define as kind of fourth year Minotaur; with the social demands of a fresher and yet the focus and maturity of a finalist (hence, the name of this post) - this isn't an easy balance to find.

  As if all of that wasn't complicated enough to get your head around, they've only gone and changed the whole layout of the modern language library too. It's now like an impenetrable labyrinth. You come in at a different entrance, which brings you onto a different floor to the one it used to. The books are still in the same places, but you feel like the structure of the building has changed, finding yourself somehow ending up in the same section you used to go to in second year, but having no idea how the route you took got you there. And the college has changed too. They've changed the structure of the dining room and it too has different entrances/ exits, new doors in different places and the kitchen is now on the opposite side to where it used to be. Absolute mind games. Feel like I'm in an episode of "Sliders" and have just slid back into a parallel universe where everything is almost exactly the same, but with crazy changes here and there and all I want to do is slide back home to the world I used to know. 

  I powered on in my disorientated state of mind, from Monday to Wednesday and started doing some cram revision for collections (Oxford college tests at the start of every term, they don't count but it's never nice to start the term with a fail.) Luckily, the college library was still exactly the same and I felt surprisingly comfortable and at peace there, almost too comfortable I think. Then, on Thursday, I had the dreaded meetings with tutors, which turned out to not be so bad. My timetable is looking scary, particularly Tuesdays, which I'm probably going to end up referring to as 'dooms day,' 'death day' or something to that affect. My new Italian tutors seem pretty quirky and are clearly totally passionate about Dante (the author whose work they will be teaching me about), which is always good.

  On Friday the anxiety hit it's climax as we sat our afternoon collection in French translations- which involved translating "popemobile" "cape and cussock" amongst other random vocabulary. Great. At least I guessed the word for Pope right. Or at least, I hope I did.

Then of course, to celebrate the end of collections and to try to find that balance I was talking about, on Saturday we all decided to be a little carefree and act like freshers for the night. So we improvised a bit of fancy dress and went to the college 'childhood dreams' -themed bop. I talked to one fresher, two second years (pretty much freshers to me), and a few third and fourth years (from what I can remember anyway!) and generally had a really fun night dancing like there's no tomorrow and forgetting about all that other stuff for just a few blissful hours. It was definitely needed. And, despite feeling a little hung over, I'm so glad I did it. I feel like it gave me the boost I needed to help me jump onto the next emotional roller-coaster ride to come: 1st week - when the real work begins.