"One who graduated yesterday, and stops learning today, is uneducated by tomorrow"

As I sit in this room, the room that I have learned to call "my room" and the room that I have learned to crave at the end of a long day of studying that lies within "my home" I realize how fully I've come to embody this experience. Experience, the act of learning from exposure to an event or events, as far as I consider it. The first week I got here the sun did not rise until almost 9 am and it set by 4:30 pm. Today is daylights saving time. As the birds still chirp outside, it is 7 pm and still light out. With every day here, I've grown. With every week here the light has shined longer and brighter.

When considering an invitation to extend into Trinity term here at Oxford, I spoke with my mom about this strange juxtaposed reacted that I had. Despite the unbelievably difficult term that I had just completed, I felt this overwhelming desire to continue through next term. While we further discussed the nature of an experience, that which I argue entails a beginning, a middle, and consequentially, an end, I realized that the nature of an experience is such that it must come to a complete finish in order to allow for a full reflection on it. The completion of an experience is ingrained, I argue, within the experience itself. Quite simply put, the end is part of the experience, perhaps the most pressing part of the experience, in fact. Since we are young we are asked: "and what have you learned from your experience?" By gracefully allowing my time here at Oxford to end with the end of my Hilary term (to be completed next week), I am giving myself the chance to fully reflect on all that I have achieved during my time here. To have continued into Trinity would have been rewarding, I am certain, however, to begin a new experience in preparation for my LSATs upon arriving home is the next experience that I must undertake. I've got an agenda.

Here at Oxford, though, I have learned how to learn.

While I am currently preparing for my final tutorial tomorrow in the concentration of British Politics, I have been researching into answers to the question that this tutorial surrounds: "How and why did Tony Blair decide to support the Bush administration after 9/11, including the Iraq War in 2003?" It's hard to dissect the motivation behind a commitment that ended so hollowly, however, it's not my job here to pass judgement, it's my job to answer the question with strong supporting references, insistently, to argue a case.

In stemming back to basic philosophy, we are all striving towards an ultimate end. Every act that we do, every experience that we go through, is driven towards this ultimate end, whether we realize it or not. As Chuck Palahnuik stated "I am the combined effort of everything and everyone I have ever known" I reflect that an experience is meant to shape us. If part of the nature of an experience, as I argued above, is it's end, then consciously allowing a "good thing to come to an end" reflects character beyond that which could have been previously known. I am authentic. My experiences have shaped me, but by deciding the delineation of how these experiences will unfold, which will ultimately lead me to my ultimate end, I am in charge. While I will be able to reflect on this whole experience better after I have moved back to the states when my sentiment will be more definitive, I can, however, confidently say this: Oxford has enabled me to realize my full potential, and with that, I'm ready for you, world ; )