I recently completed my first year of undergrad at Oxford. Coming from Toronto, studying abroad was a completely new experience. I’ve met some really cool people, learned new things, and got to see the big differences between Canadian and British culture. Now that the year is over, I thought I would distill my experience into a couple of takeaways. Hopefully this can be useful currently going into first year or even beyond. I think this is mostly specific to UK universities, but it is also widely applicable to other systems as well.
While this task seems daunting, note that it doesn’t need to be over the span of 30 years. Even figuring out what you want to do over the next 5 years is good enough. For me, I’m pretty interested in protein design. For others, it could be frontier AI research, sculpting, writing, etc. Whatever you seem interested in, and that fits your criteria for fulfillment, note it down. It’s also worth knowing what level you want to be in this craft. For example, if you want to become a world-renowned expert in a field, you will need much more drive and hard work than someone who just wants to support existing systems. Both of these pathways are fine, but just realize that it’s hard to get the benefits of both.
I think there’s this narrative, especially in the UK, that you need to study for a decade before even starting to enter a field. Due to this mindset, people will often sit idle while time passes by studying. I think it’s always a good idea to just build random projects in a field, and then share those projects with people online. While no tangible result feels guaranteed to come out of it, a project can lead to some great outcomes. For example, I ran a protein design campaign similar to one ran by the Baker Lab. Since I wrote about and posted the project online, I was serendipitously given the opportunity to visit the lab and learn from the best people in the field. I think the lesson from this experience is that it only takes one successful project to jumpstart your journey in a field. In a world where degrees are becoming more common and jobs are fewer, it is these projects and experiences that will separate you from the crowd.
I think a lot of people will see “geniuses” and feel they could never contribute to a field in the same way. For the most part, I don’t think this is true. I’ve found that when you place yourself in an environment where people hold you to higher standards and treat you as part of the system, you will often bring yourself up to their level. This is similar to turning water from hot to cold immediately; it feels intense at first, but your body slowly adjusts. While this may not extrapolate well in highly technical fields like advanced ML or physics, it definitely becomes easier as topics become more rooted in intuition rather than foundational principles. Your brain is pretty smart and can fill in the gaps.
I think a cool thing about university is that you can meet a lot of cool people. While it’s common to stick around people like yourself, I think it’s good to meet different people every now and then. This helps you to see things from new perspectives. This doesn’t mean that you should led your world-view become an average of the population; simply listen to what other people think and take what you see to be true. You can make some really good friends this way!
While clubs and societies are a great way to meet people, I think a lot of people actually overextend themselves. Joining many of these clubs has several effects: you have less time to work on projects, you don’t have as much time to nurture closer relationships, and you end up spreading your interests too thin. I think the ideal number of clubs is something you should think of yourself. For me, it was 0. For others, maybe 1 to 2 is good. The same thing applies to studying as well. I mainly study course material when I need to (eg. before an exam, for a tutorial). The return on investment of my time is much higher for building a project over continuing to study more, so that’s what I end up doing. While it’s not good advice for most people to drop out of school, overstudying is definitely a real problem.
I wrote these takeaways as mostly notes to myself. Hopefully you may find them useful as well. They’re not particularly novel, but they’re important enough that it’s worth reiterating. Let me know if you have any thoughts!
Thank you for reading.