Balancing school work with life can be a challenge during the Carleton trimester. My off-campus studies program, Living London (Winter 2025), had the standard load—three courses in ten weeks. I was a little worried at the start, wanting as much time as possible to explore the city on my own. However, on an OCS program where the city is the academic subject, classroom, and playground, the boundary between work and play can get blurry. I encourage any student about to embark on their own off-campus adventure to be prepared for learning to strike at any moment, and for the chance that the most fun they’ll have this term will be during “class.”
We saw a whopping 22 plays for our “London Theater” course. Two or three times a week, we took the Tube to London’s West End for performances that ranged widely in scope and genre. We saw everything from an epic production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the 2,000-seat Theatre Royal Drury Lane to a short, modern thriller called An Interrogation where our group of 20-something made up half the audience. When I think about the plays, I almost feel like I’ve gotten away with something; never again will I have the opportunity to see so many fantastic performances in such a short amount of time. Even though my first task at these shows was to gather insights for upcoming class discussions and assignments, I often forgot I was there for school. My favorite moments in London were spent at the theater.
For our English course, “Reading Multicultural London,” we read four novels over the course of the term, along with a few stories and essays. This is a slightly lighter workload compared to an on-campus English class, but we spent a good amount of time immersed in fictional London perspectives. These stories unlocked new ways of seeing the city. I could orient myself in unfamiliar streets, stations, and neighborhoods because I had been there before, as the characters. Since I had experienced the city through the eyes of mid-twentieth century Caribbean (“Windrush generation”) immigrants in my readings, I could recognize the historical significance when the new Windrush overground line was introduced into the train system. Writers like Virginia Woolf and Sam Selvon helped me make sense of my own London experience.
We spent our third class, “Urban Field Studies,” walking through various parts of the city on guided visits. We explored the literary neighborhood of Bloomsbury, spent an afternoon “mudlarking” on the shores of the Thames, and traced the path of Oscar Wilde. While these tours were engaging and informative, the most interesting part came at the end of class, when all of us were suddenly faced with the choice of returning to the familiarity of our flats in South Kensington or venturing into the new area we found ourselves in. Had this course not required me to be in a far-flung neighborhood each Wednesday morning, I might not have discovered some of my favorite coffee shops, museums and parks in the city.
Classes aren’t everything on OCS. There was plenty of downtime built into the program for students to relax, explore London’s cultural offerings, and to wander the city on foot. However, while I was out by myself or with friends, the concepts I was studying followed me. I wasn’t “walking,” I was “street haunting” like Virginia Woolf: intensely observing my surroundings and putting myself into the shoes of the diverse Londoners, travelers, and pigeons I shared the sidewalk with.
The strength of the London program and other Carleton OCS programs is that they create the conditions for a wide range of experiences by emphasizing exploration and reflection. No two students lived the same London. I recommend that off-campus students resist the impulse to get caught up on grades, and focus on the connections they can find between the material they are studying and the real life happening all around them. The city is a wonderful classroom.
