Celebrating Success: Toffy Olarinde

Toffy Olarinde (2019, Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics) recently excelled in her first set of (prelims) exams at Pembroke. We caught up with Toffy, who shared her experience of Oxford life.

‘My first year at Pembroke so far has been amazing and beyond what I was expecting, both in terms of how much I'm getting out of the course and how much I'm getting out of the university experience in general.

Over the first two terms I looked into many different and intriguing topics within psychology, from object knowledge in infants to how attention affects our ability to process our environment. Linguistics was an entirely new subject for me, and learning the basics of how language is studied and categorised and applying it to my own knowledge has been incredibly enjoyable.

As different as the two may seem, finding overlapping themes and approaching linguistics topics from a psychological perspective and vice versa has considerably developed my confidence in critically analysing arguments and debates. Being able to do this with the supportive and engaging tutors and other people on my course has been an added bonus to this experience.

Outside of academics, I have been assisting on an online platform designed to support people studying English with questions they have about both the language itself and the cultural norms that inform the usage of the language. As well as tying into the linguistics half of my course, it's been incredibly fulfilling helping English learners to correct areas that are more complex than prescribed grammar rules, as well as improving my own knowledge about languages in general as a result of my interactions with speakers of many languages that differ wildly from what we consider "normal" in English.’