A Message from Jamie McClung Director of the UGA at Oxford Study Abroad Program
UGA at Oxford: Promoting discomfort for 25 years and counting
H
ello to our Alumni, friends, and family throughout the US and across the globe, and welcome to the 2014 edition of the Oxford Bulldog. I hope that wherever we find you with this issue, you and yours are in good health and happiness. In turn, within these pages you’ll find evidence of the Program’s own health and happiness, as well as some interesting details on initiatives and goals for the coming year which we believe will ensure that status well into our future. 2013 has been the biggest year in our Program’s history in many ways: more scholarships were awarded than ever before; more students participated than ever before. We have had a greater number of returning students than ever before. One of our alumna has been awarded a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. In greater numbers, we have had participants return to Oxford and the UK to pursue jobs, graduate study, and internships. Indeed, within these pages, you’ll find much cause for celebration. Enough about being happy though; after all, I began this message by declaring that the UGA at Oxford Program is in the business of promoting discomfort – and we are. Of course, if you have ever seen the ‘dreaming spires’ of Oxford, first described as such by the poet Matthew Arnold, or if you have had the pleasure of stepping through those now iconic Bulldog red front doors at 104 Banbury Road, I wouldn’t blame you for wondering (out loud) what in the world I was talking about. As I tell most every group of students who enters our programs, they are there for one reason, ultimately, they are there because they are willing to be uncomfortable. I don’t mean physically or conditionally – though those who have braved the University rugby teams, early morning crew training, and soccer fields might beg to differ – I mean socially, academically, and intellectually. What sets our Program and the students who participate in it apart are the extreme challenges of academic depth and breadth, all undertaken in a place both literally and figuratively foreign. Think back to the first time an Oxford tutor contacted you and ordered you to read 1,500 pages and write a ten-page essay, three days in advance of your first tutorial: you knew you were a stranger in a strange land. When, moments later, a second tutor asked for you to complete a research project of similar size and scope, due on the same day, things took a turn for the distinctly uncomfortable. Still, you did it. Better yet, you did the same thing the next week, the next, and the week after that. Before you knew it, the uncomfortable had become the familiar. Suddenly, you couldn’t imagine a week in Oxford that didn’t feature the white-knuckled-3am-typing in the Keble library or at the House, followed by a day in the Bodleian or rushing off to catch an earlymorning train for that trip to Paris you had somehow (crazily) decided to squeeze in at the end of a long and busy week. That exhaustion you felt at the end of your Program was your success, physically manifest: you tackled the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, and you not only survived, you flourished. As David Bradshaw often says to each group the first Sunday after arrival in Oxford, if you don’t get on that plane and return to the States completely and utterly ‘knackered’, you haven’t taken full advantage of what UGA at Oxford and Oxford itself has to offer. UGA has scores of study abroad opportunities; there are wonderful destinations: nations and corners of the globe which are exotic, rugged, undeveloped, and wild, but if you are reading this message, you know the UGA at Oxford Program provides levels of discomfort and challenges that simply cannot be rivalled. For those who may be reading this with an eye toward participation at some point in the future, take the leap. Discomfort will never be more rewarding.
All very best,
UGA at Oxford Program Staff Director Dr. James McClung Associate Director Dr. Michelle Miles Assistant Director Margaret Faz Perry Business Manager Kasha Puskarz Administrative Assistant Hayes Willingham Graduate Assistant Jennifer Bogdanich
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