CSU students in Oxford discover confidence is key to success

OXFORD, U.K. – Year after year, Tonya Streeter decided not to apply to the visiting student program at the University of Oxford, one of the world’s finest universities.

Tonya, a Glenwood graduate from Phenix City, learned of the program as a freshman at Columbus State University and wanted to apply. But, Tonya worried her family couldn’t afford it. She’d never been away from home for more than a day. And, she feared flying.

Three years later, as a senior, Tonya knew it was now or never. She applied and was accepted.

Today, Tonya is enrolled in Oxford’s Regent’s Park College, studying Chaucer and Shakespeare.

She and classmate Ellie Pippas, a Brookstone graduate from Columbus, are the latest of 52 CSU students to enroll in Oxford’s visiting student program, made possible by J. Kyle Spencer’s gift of a house for CSU students in Oxford – it’s named Spencer House – and scholarships to pay their tuition.

But, since Spencer’s death in 2015, financial issues cloud the program. Spencer and his wife Sally provided the scholarships year-by-year but did not endow a scholarship fund for future students.

CSU hopes to raise $1 million to endow a scholarship fund, according to program director Daniel Ross, and there are “some indications of a major commitment.” Without the aid, CSU students would have to make up the difference between the tuition they pay CSU and Oxford’s tuition – a gap of about $29,000. The “worst of all possibilities,” Ross says.

I first wrote about the visiting student program at its start in 2003. It was designed by Neal McCrillis, then director of international education at CSU, who encouraged the visit. I wanted to go back to Oxford more than a decade later to see what’s happened.

The first CSU students enrolled in 2006, according to CSU’s office of international education. There were three that year, typically English and history majors. Some years as many as nine enrolled, other years none.

Student and faculty awareness and interest explain the variance, according to Ross, as well as the condition of the U.S. economy. “Since the market crash in 2009,” Ross said, fewer students major in the humanities – the program’s focus.

The CSU program was associated with Greyfriars, one of the 44 colleges and halls that comprise Oxford. Greyfriars was run by an order of Catholic monks. The CSU program shifted to Regent’s Park College, run by the Baptist Union, after Greyfriars closed in 2008.

I met Tonya Streeter my first day back in Oxford.

She walked me around Regent’s main building, a two-story, neoclassical quadrangle, most of it covered by Virginia creeper. We saw Helwys Hall, the high-ceilinged, pine-paneled room where students take meals every day and hold formal dinners on Friday. Students bow upon leaving or entering if interrupting a meal in progress, Tonya said.

It was “veggie day” and my Mexican-style lasagna was excellent – and cheap.

We entered the Junior Common Room, understood to be among the best at Oxford, a center of undergraduate student life, much like a mini student union. First-year students run the JCR bar, which Tonya said is the cheapest in Oxford. A bar menu, taped to the wall, promoted “New term. New drinks.” They cost as little as one pound, about $1.29.

Tonya was surprised by the student bar. “There’s no alcohol at CSU,” she said.

We trooped upstairs to the college’s library, which houses collections in theology, the humanities and the social sciences – subjects of greatest interest to Regent’s students. It’s a quiet space where many students, laptops open, study and write. Tonya showed me a couch just outside the library entrance where she stopped to rest one day early in her stay, then fell asleep. Turns out a famous Baptist missionary, William Carey, died on this couch in 1934.

And, we met Emmanuelle, the 114-year-old tortoise, the college’s mascot, famous for winning a pair of Oxford tortoise races. Emmanuelle lives in a small wooden box in the courtyard, and had just emerged from winter hibernation, Tonya said.

Visiting students like Tonya and Ellie must meet Oxford’s highly-selective admission standards. Once admitted, they are Oxford students like any other, complete with University of Oxford student ID cards.

They take two courses per term. Some are lectures. Most are tutorials where they meet weekly (or every other week) with a member of the college’s faculty to discuss the 2,000-word essay assigned the week before.

The essays challenge every Oxford student. The days I was there one of the student newspapers ran a story headlined: Beginner’s guide to the all-night essay crisis. “First up, lower your expectations,” it advised. “The focus here is hitting the word count, not a revolutionary argument.”

“We all have essay crises,” Tonya said.

Ellie recalls getting an essay assignment with only two days to write. That’s “not normal,” Ellie said. She worried about not finishing on time, that it was “not up to my potential.” The class was abnormal psychology, difficult no matter how much time you have to write. But Ellie’s essay received a top grade, she said, and today the tutor who assigned it is supervising her honors thesis.

Tonya and Ellie shared the same questions as they arrived in Oxford, Ellie in the fall of 2016, Tonya in the winter of 2017: Did they belong here? Would they fit in? It all came down to the same issue: confidence.

We talked about it over lunch the second day I visited at Green’s Café, a student haunt just steps from the college.

Tonya recalled the day she arrived at Spencer House. She intended to walk the city, visit a bookstore, attend a choral service that evening in Christ Church Cathedral. Coming down the stairs, Tonya missed a step, sprained an ankle, and spent the first week of Oxford in bed.

“That’s what coming to another country is like,” Tonya said. “Breaking your foot.” But then, she said, it’s about getting up and moving on – an early experience and a regular reminder of what it takes to succeed here.

“It wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t have issues of confidence,” Ellie said. “The best minds are here and we’re competing with them.”

But both are doing well and glad to be here.

Ellie will return to CSU next fall as a senior. After that, she says, it’s a doctoral program in psychology, then medical school and a residency in psychiatry. Her ambition is to treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorders.

Tonya graduates from CSU in December. She’d like to return to Oxford for graduate studies. Her ambition is to write creative non-fiction. Or, to work with animals.

“I have lots of options,” Tonya says. “Oxford has given me confidence that I can do anything.”

Greenman publishes a travel website for Columbus, www.36hoursincolumbus.com. He is a retired professor of journalism at the University of Georgia and former president and publisher of the Ledger-Enquirer.

This story was originally published May 9, 2017 at 5:50 PM with the headline "CSU students in Oxford discover confidence is key to success."