Every few days, without fail, my friend sends me a screenshot of his cold email spreadsheet. Dozens of colour-coded rows list firms I’ve never heard of, tracking interviews, rejections, and the occasional win. I receive them with a familiar cocktail of guilt, stress, and vague dread. I tell myself I don’t care. I came to the University of Oxford to pursue knowledge, not to optimise my LinkedIn. But hours later, I inevitably find myself doomscrolling CareerConnect.
It’s easy to criticise “internship culture”, with its nerves and competition, but it’s worth asking why it’s so contagious. At Oxford, where ambition is concentrated and comparison is practically unavoidable, the pressure to plan early isn’t a bug but a feature. The question is not whether this culture exists, but whether it is entirely corrosive – or whether, handled well, it can sharpen purpose rather than hollow it out. For this reason, it’s worth defending.
There’s a classic line: you are the product of the five people you spend the most time with. If that’s true, it explains what makes Oxford so distinct. The teaching is excellent, but the academic and curricular differences between any top university are likely marginal. What truly separates Oxford is selection. The admissions process concentrates intense, ambitious people in one place: almost everyone has some deep passion, side project, or sense of purpose. You are surrounded by students who expect a lot from themselves – and, implicitly, from you.
This intensity seeps into daily life, amplified by Oxford’s physical and social structure. Dining halls and their long tables regularly seat you by people you don’t know. New connections and conversations strike up easily. This dynamic is replicated everywhere: society socials, lectures, and college bars. Networking becomes an everyday experience. You occasionally become aware that you might be talking to the next prime minister, Stephen Hawking, or Nigella Lawson.
Inevitably, talks drift towards future plans – not because everyone is soullessly ambitious, but because when everyone around you is building something, standing still feels like falling behind.
Of course, this has costs. You start measuring yourself against friends, and pressure accumulates. But, to use the cliché, diamonds are formed under pressure. Competition incentivises innovation and improvement. You see what is possible earlier, you learn faster, and your standards rise.
I hated my friend’s screenshots, but they worked. They forced me to confront how passive I’d been about my own future. I joined more committees, updated my CV, and, reluctantly, downloaded LinkedIn. I discovered exciting opportunities I would never have considered otherwise. I’m no hardcore careerist, but proximity to ambition is motivating.
This isn’t to deny that this culture can be toxic. If your self-worth depends entirely on employability, something has gone wrong. But not all pressure is poison. High-pressure environments have always produced excellence alongside stress. We accept this in sports and music; why not careers?
Internships are also undervalued as learning tools in themselves. It’s not mere résumé-padding, but a test run to gather information about your own preferences and abilities before the consequences become dire. Discovering at 19 that you would absolutely despise investment banking is far better than discovering that at 25 with rent to pay and no alternatives.
The logic is temporal: work now reduces panic later. We accept this principle everywhere else: we revise before exams, not after results. Yet we treat internships as unnecessary stress rather than what they really are: an insurance against future panic. Thinking seriously about the future can provide vision and purpose. Insulating ourselves from the outside world doesn’t preserve some purer intellectual life; we just delay an inevitable confrontation with reality.
Finally, we should interrogate the moral tone of some anti-hustle critiques. Wanting a fulfilling, well-paid, meaningful career is not shallow. For many students, it’s not optional. Dismissing concern about employment as trivial is often a position made comfortable by safety nets, family connections, and wealth. It is quietly elitist, echoing an era where jobs didn’t matter, and university was just a playground for the aristocracy before they returned to their family estates.
Internship culture deserves critique, but also recognition. The problem is pursuing an abstract goal without understanding what success means for you. Instead, acknowledge pressure but don’t let careers become totalising. At a place like Oxford, competition is both a by-product and driver of excellence and personal growth. We pretend students shouldn’t care too much about their futures, while quietly rewarding those who do.
If my friend is reading this, though: please stop sending me screenshots of your spreadsheet.
