So you study Facebook at Hogwarts?: Moving In

I was welcomed to Oxford and St. Cross College on the last Wednesday of September with sunny skies and warm weather (in the 70s -- and it lasted for about a week!). Every Oxford student is associated with a college. For undergraduates, this is where you are educated. For graduate students, it serves more of an administrative, food/housing, and social function. St. Cross is a college with just graduate students, and it is about 70% international. It is right next to the city centre and basically across the street from my department, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

More on St. Cross and my room after the jump:

I live on the main site of St. Cross. There are 18 rooms here spread over 3 floors. Each corridor/floor has 6 people, a kitchen (with no table), 2 toilets, and 2 showers.

The kitchens have drink-size fridges and freezers, so you can't go on big food-shopping trips. My corridor has a 2010 Hoya who I didn't know back at school and guys from Beirut, England, and Italy. There is also apparently an Asian girl who I have not met. All the rooms are singles with sinks in them. We get our rooms vacuumed and our sink area cleaned once a week by a person called our "scout." She also cleans our kitchen, shower, and toilets. Apparently my room is small for Oxford standards, but after living on Georgetown's campus and sharing a 100 sq ft room, it seems big to me. Not having any shared space makes this a pretty anti-social place to live, but the location is amazing.

My room:

The open window behind the fence and column is my room

St. Cross Front (Blackwell) Quad:

St. Cross Back Quad:

The accommodations section is in this back wing, but my room does not look out at the quad. I can see the quad of Blackfriars Hall and the Sackler Library.

The college offers lunch Monday - Friday and dinner on Tuesday nights. Dinner is called "formal hall," and it is a 3-course meal followed by tea/coffee where we wear our academic gown over our regular clothes and grace is said before/after the meal. St. Cross halls each have a themed menu. Some colleges have formal hall every night - and formal hall could mean anything from how St. Cross does it to having to get dressed up for dinner. The food here is excellent, and we don't have a high table, which means important people at the college eat the same food at the same tables as the students. Colleges with a high table tend to have cheaper but worse food because students don't get the same food as the college master and fellows.

The college also has a library, common room, bar, and meeting room. It is attached to Pusey House (pronounced Pew-zee), a church with a chapel and library.