Hi everyone!
I’m so sorry for not having written anything in such a long time! I was so busy with adjusting to the new university life and to all the work that I had to do. So let me fill you in on how I spent the eight weeks that I was in Oxford last term.
The moment Freshers’ week was over, most of us realised that studying in Oxford will be no piece of cake. As I received the work for the first week from my tutors, I was more and more scared, as the amount of reading and writing we were meant to do was really large - and all of it was to be done within one week, only to be replaced with another similar workload for the next week.
PPE students get taught through lectures, classes and tutorials. On average, we have two lectures, taught centrally by the university, every day (Thursdays, however, were a lecture-free luxury for us this term!). Classes and tutorials are organised by our colleges and thus their numbers vary among PPE students. At my college, I had two hour-long tutorials (Political Institutions and Microeconomics) every week, a Logic class every odd week and a Moral Philosophy tutorial every even week. This, compared to other universities, probably looks like a very empty schedule - until you see our reading lists, and the worksheets and essays we have to complete for each class and tutorial.
For Philosophy, we either had to write an essay or complete a problem sheet - depending on whether it was a Moral or Logic week. In Logic we were going through basics of propositional logic - while this was interesting and certainly useful, I struggled with it significantly and am not going to carry on with Logic in the second term (I do, however have to sit a collection in it). I enjoyed Moral philosophy a lot, we were focusing on J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism and topics related to it - for example, happiness.
Our focus in Economics was on mathematics (as you need a lot of it, especially calculus, to understand economic concepts and models properly) and microeconomics. Most of work for Economics was problem sheets full of mathematical problems, some of them applied to an economic context. I must say that university level Economics is certainly a big step up from A Level Economics and Mathematics, but our tutors are very well aware of this and do not expect us to be perfect in every single exercise we do.
Last but not least, in Politics we studied the Political institutions of the UK, the USA, France and Germany. This was very interesting and fun, but required massive amounts of reading (which I struggled with simply from the point of lack of time, although I enjoyed all of it).
One thing that took time to get used to is the fact that in Oxford our lecture topics, apart from economics and logic, do not necessarily correspond to what we are studying in tutorials. So, for example, while we nearly completed all of Moral Philosophy in Michaelmas Term (the first term in Oxford speak :-)), we will only have lectures on it in the next term. This just reinforces the notion of the fact that we are expected to engage mostly in independent study, rather than to rely on the information provided in lectures (that’s why surprisingly many people actually never go to lectures at all).
Now life in Oxford is, of course, not only about work all the time (although it does take up most of our time). Whether it is watching Criminal Minds series with my friend in her room or going out for dinner, I do get to spend a lot of time with my newly-met friends in Oxford. But to keep this blog post focused on academia, I am going to end it now and tell you to make sure you stay tuned for the next post where I will tell you all about how I spent the minor amounts of free time that I had in the last term.
I will be back soon!
