I've barely kept up with her so am not clued up on how her Masters is going. Presumably, it can't be going too well if she's having to escape from it to this extent but maybe someone can shed some light there? Anyhow, I really want to know what she's going to do after this year. She surely can't put off getting a job any longer, unless she pursues YouTube full time (which is plausible). What content does she do though? Surely stuff like this at 25/26/27 will be insanely creepy and I'm not sure who the audience would be either? I'm at a loss.
We can only speculate about her Masters since she's said almost nothing about the content of her degree or her actual experience studying at Oxford, but...
She mentioned that it took 5 tries to get her tutor just to come up with an idea for an essay question that was acceptable for her first essay there. That's just the basic thesis question for what would've been her easiest essay there, so it doesn't bode well for her managing to come up with an actual essay of any merit or quality for that essay or the rest.
She's mentioned absolutely nothing about her grades. Ruby's always been hyperfixated on her grades and has always seemed and acted practically entitled to the highest one. Despite her occasional 'GRADES AREN'T AVVERYTHING' lip service disclaimers, if she's ever got a high grade or top marks before (even high-but-not-the-highest grades that she's "disappointed" by), she'll always rush to announce it and VARRY HOMBLY brag about it in her next video, even if it's completely unrelated to the video. At Oxford she's said nothing at all, suggesting that her grades have been dismal.
She posted vague Insta stories about how she was having bad mental health days right around grade feedback time of her first term. Possibly unrelated, but the timing is noteworthy and seems to support the above.
She's taken an unprecedented hiatus from content creation during the essay period of her second term and long after. The only videos she's posted during this time have been a rushed vlog titled 'the inevitable stress of essay season' in which she mentioned that she'd been feeling highly anxious about filming during this period (but refused to say why), and then this latest mental breakdown of a video. If she did badly on the first round of essays, there was more pressure to miraculously do better on her second, harder batch of essays to pull her grades up, which doesn't seem likely, and this new video doesn't exactly suggest she knocked it out of the park.
She's looked absolutely miserable practically every moment at her "dream school". In libraries, on campus, while studying, she's looked increasingly morose. No surprise that she's looked hopelessly miserable every time she's had to film herself in a library filled with other, much smarter students doing far more work. The only time she's looked remotely happy there is doing small social things completely unrelated to studying with the one friend she's made there.
Independent thought has never been her strong suit and she's always floundered massively when expected to come up with her own ideas and do her own work. It's why she hit a wall with her dissertation. At Exeter she was almost completely reliant on grade inflation, her dodgy system of academic shortcuts and her major rhymes-with-Cakeknee crutch to get her through while doing as little of her own work as she could. At Oxford, the bar will be massively higher, with infinitely more expectation from tutors for a student to showcase independent, original thought in essays. Ruby's not built for that, so it's not at all surprising that she's hitting bottom academically now she can't skip the required reading, recycle the ideas of other scholars and copy Blakeney's homework.
All signs point to her wading into Oxford expecting an easy ride where she'd slap together a few essays from ChatGPT extracts, recycled lecture handouts from AXATAR and copy-and-pasted academic quotes, then spend all her time twirling round libraries trying to rub everyone's noses in the fact that she's an AWKSFWUD STEEYOODONT who's JANUINELY living out her wildest dark macadamia Hogwarts daydreams. Reality seems to have hit her instantly and won't stop swinging.
