Matriculation time

Sorry folks, I'm a little behind the times with blog posts of late..... It's been a busy couple of weeks since classes have started.

The subject of this post is Matriculation, the time-honoured traditional entrance ceremony that all new students of Oxford must attend in order to be considered official members of the University.

Matriculation, from the student point of view at least, goes like this:

You get up early on a Saturday morning near the start of the fall term. You dress up in sub-fusc academic dress. This needs further explanation....sub-fusc consists (for men) of a dark suit, white shirt, white bow tie, as well as the academic gown and cap. It's one of the most formal dress codes for Oxford events. All students must wear this attire in order to be allowed to attend Matriculation, which is a mandatory event....so you basically have no choice, you wear the stuff and don't complain. Students must also be dressed in this fashion for exams at the end of the winter semester. I can't say that I'm all-together looking forward to dressing in full academic gown for three days worth of exams.....but we'll cross that bridge when it comes.

After getting dressed up, the students of each college gather together to proceed en-masse towards the centre of the city where the Matriculation ceremony takes place. This part is actually quite amusing, it's a bit like herding cattle through town....there are staff members who keep trying to encourage the group to stay together and the whole line of students inevitably gets split up and spread out. The poor tourists in the streets didn't really seem to know what was going on.....perhaps they assume that everyday is like this in Oxford?

My Matriculation ceremony was held in the 'Examination Schools', the location of the previously mentioned evaluations at the end of the winter term. After about 40mins of waiting to be let in and then waiting for the other colleges to arrive we were finally ushered into the 'holding pens' inside the building so the ceremony could begin. We stood in rows inside a large hall that had many large portraits of apparently famous people and high ceilings. I felt badly for the shorter students who probably didn't see a whole lot of anything except the back of the person in front of them.

The ceremony itself was short - about 10mins in total. A University official said some words in Latin (basically a long way of saying, 'you are now admitted'), followed by a short welcome speech in English and then it was all over. Back to the college where it all started for a group photo and then a free lunch with free wine. The whole experience sort of leaves you with the impression that some traditions, while symbolically important to the institution, may lack a little in translation for those unaccustomed to the pomp & circumstance of life in Oxford. All in all it was fun, people love to get dressed up here!

Thanks to Heidi and Pauline for some of the photos which I borrowed from Facebook.