Life after Bellerbys College

Hilary Term!

Hi again!

 

Yes, I do have to apologise again for not having written anything during this term. I really underestimated the amount of work I would have - and in the interest of getting at least some sleep I had to prioritise course work over everything else. 

 

On Saturday night I came back to Prague from my second full term in Oxford. In many ways Hilary term was much better than the first term: going to Oxford in January, I already knew more or less what to expect not only in terms of work, but also in terms of knowing the people in college and on my course, and knowing my way around (although yes, it does still happen that I get lost in some tiny street, it just happens much less often :-) ). 

 

When it comes to work, I feel like I enjoyed it much more this term than in Michaelmas - this is despite the fact that quantitatively we actually had more work. The fact that I had very little sleep throughout the term, however, did not prevent me from thoroughly enjoying it! In economics, we moved on from microeconomics (which we studied the entire first term) to macroeconomics, which I tend to enjoy more, since it’s feels less theoretical and more “observable” in the real world. In philosophy, we studied General philosophy, and I felt like we finally began dealing with “properly” philosophical subjects - the issues of knowledge (How do we know what we know? Do we actually know anything? Can we be sure of things?), induction (If we had seen the sun come out every single day in the past, are we justified in believing that the sun will come out the next day too?), perception (When we perceive a table in front of us, can we be sure there is actually a table, and we are not being merely deceived?) and alike were discussed and I enjoyed this thoroughly, although writing essays on such topics, that feel very abstract, was really challenging. I also enjoyed the new module in politics - political theory, where we discussed basic political concepts such as liberty and democracy, and the most influential writers on these topics, mainly Mill and Rousseau. All of my subjects had thus moved to study areas that I am more interested in, and therefore, although I enjoyed the first term too, Hilary was much more enjoyable and fun for me.

 

Given the very large amount of work that I had, however, I did not get a proper chance again to take part in many events across the university or in my college - even so, though, the 8 weeks of our term seemed to have gone by so quickly!

 

The highlight of my activities out of work were probably the debates in the Oxford Union. I believe I had not mentioned the Union here before, so let me just briefly introduce what this is. The Oxford Union is (or so they say) the most prestigious debating society in the world, inviting many famous and influential speakers not only from the UK, but from all over the world. Famously, Harold Macmillan (a British Prime Minister in the 1960s, who studied in Oxford) once said that the Union is “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”, and I must say that this is indeed what one sees when observing the debates. Students giving their opinions and debating issues very thoroughly - that is what really happens in the Union, at a level unparalleled at any other institution. Although I do not myself directly participate in debates, I keenly go there as often as I can to listen to what not only the famous speakers have to say, but also to the students who often have very interesting insights. For example, the debates I attended this term included debates on civil disobedience, on religion in politics and other very interesting topics relevant to the current world. It is no wonder that so many British politicians had taken part in the Union debates back when they studied in Oxford. 

 

This is, indeed very briefly, what I was doing in Oxford during Hilary Term 2012.

I will be back with more, hopefully interesting, posts soon!

 

A Week in the Life of a PPE Student

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! 

 

Freshers' Week at Oxford University

So the day finally came - I packed up my suitcase (yes, I only had one, because of the plane allowance), woke up at 4 am, went to the airport and took off, on my way to Oxford. It took me about 6 hours from the Prague airport to the Porter’s Lodge of St Hilda’s College.

From the very first moment everyone was really friendly and talkative, so the initial worries about not being able to talk to anyone and about finding it hard to make friends were gone very soon. Not very many people had arrived on the Sunday like me, but after we had unpacked and settled in our rooms, we went to eat ice cream in a local gorgeous coffee shop, then we had an informal Freshers’ dinner with some of the second years, and the whole day went by very quickly. 

On Monday the rest of the people arrived, a whole lot of new faces on the college grounds and in the corridors. The University had prepared an orientation programme for international students, so that is what I attended from the early morning until early afternoon - it was an event packed with information about life in Oxford in general. The rest of the time that day we were going around meeting various people - it’s a shame that it is literally impossible to remember everyone’s names!

The highlight of the day was probably a musical performance in our on-site music building, where the most talented music bands of the University were singing - including Out of the Blue (whom you might know from the latest Britain’s Got Talent show!!) who were simply amazing! A big clubbing night was taking place on Monday (and on most of the other nights of the week), but I did not go to any of them as I was feeling quite overwhelmed and tired by everything.

For those of you, however, who really like clubbing, don’t listen to the people who mock Oxford by saying that our Freshers’ week consists of playing chess and drinking tea - that simply is not true (although if you would enjoy that, you can surely find others here who would, too ;-))! 

After having registered with the university, the college, the doctors and having listened to various talks on Tuesday, we had a more or less free day, which then therefore included a lot of shopping a lot of chatting and meeting new people. In the evening I went for a walk around Oxford with some of my international friends, and then we stayed in one of the rooms in College and were talking and simply had fun! 

Wednesday was our very first formal dinner - we had to wear academic gowns to meet with our tutors, and then we spent the whole evening in the dining hall, talking to them about various things. Although I was worried that the dinner would be awkward, it was a really nice way of getting to know our tutors, whom we will be seeing very often now. Also, the food served was absolutely delicious! 

One of the great events of the Freshers’ week was the Freshers’ Fair that we had on Thursday - there were about 400 different university-wide societies/commercial companies all very keen to get our e-mail addresses and give us a lot of free stuff in exchange. I signed up for a huge amount of societies, because it was so hard to refuse once their representatives started talking to me! We also had a college Fresher’s Fair on Saturday, where, in turn, all the college societies were represented and where we got very beautiful free mugs with our college’s name on them! 

On Thursday we also met our tutors for the first time and we already got assigned relatively huge amounts of reading and problem sheet solving, so it seemed like the Freshers’ week was over. However, most people still found time to go clubbing on that night and to go to a college family dinner on Friday.

To explain a little bit about this, in Oxford, normally two second year students from a college get “married” and get assigned two or so Freshers, who then become their college children. Our college parents are then our first point of contact for any issues we might have. To get to know them a little better, we each had our Friday dinner in our college parents’ house, which was really great fun! 

The Freshers’ week (or the 0th week as we sometimes call it) officially ended with the Saturday evening’s bop. You probably do not know what such a bop is - but in short it is a themed dress up party that happens every two/three weeks in Oxford colleges. Our bop theme was “dress up as your subject”.

Many people wore really beautiful fancy costumes that took them a very long time to make and that really did impress everyone. I, for PPE, had a t-shirt with a question mark (for Philosophy, as it includes asking a lot of questions), an exclamation mark (for Politics, as politicians like to dictate to others) and a dollarmark (for Economics, for obvious reasons). The bop was a very fun event and it was a perfect way of ending the busiest week of our lives, the Freshers’ week!

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics).

Summer Holidays

Hi everyone!

As I promised, I'm writing to tell you about what I have been doing throughout the summer! Hope you are going to enjoy reading this - feel free to comment and to suggest what you'd like to read next!

For us A2 students the Summer Term finished relatively late - we had exams until the end of June and we were extremely jealous of our AS and Foundation friends, who had gone back home to relax by mid-June! However, the end of exams came eventually (it is impossible to describe how great it felt when me and my friends were leaving the exam hall after our last Economics exam) and the summer began! For me it was really difficult to say goodbye to Brighton - after all, it had been my home for nearly two years and I've grown very attached to it. I must admit that as my friends were seeing me off at the train station, I actually cried. Luckily, it only took a very short time for me to get back to Prague, and once I was at home, I felt very happy and almost forgot about how sad I was when leaving Brighton.

Once at home, I spent the first few days just resting - during the exam period I had a significant sleep deficit, so I needed to catch up! We went to see my grandparents at their country house in Moravia, where we had a very nice time - my brother was helping out in the garden while I was mostly reading and enjoying the feeling of being able to read books other than coursebooks for a while! It was amazing to be able to catch up with my family!

Having spent most of July in Prague, I was very excited when we went to Croatia - me, my brother and our parents. Apart from the car journey (which took 12 hours and was simply exhausting) I had an awesome time. Swimming in the sea, eating Croatian food (which is, by the way, extremely delicious - I can never have enough of it) and in general just relaxing was very nice and comforting.

I really like Croatian nature, although you have to be an early bird to be able to see some of it on the mainland - from 9 am the coast starts to be packed with tourists and it's not very beautiful at all. One day I took the time to wake up early (and by early I mean 5:30 am) and I saw the very beautiful sunrise, and I also went to take a few pictures of the coast. Here is a little example of what it looked like:-) 

It was a harsh return back to reality in the middle of August. When I came back from Croatia, it was only 3 days until the very dreaded A Level results day. I couldn't sleep very well the night before, I was waking up every hour or so and checking the time, hoping that it would be 7 am already and I could check the results and UCAS Track to see if I had got into university. It was really a very stressful time, especially as UCAS created a very unpleasant surprise for me when I logged in - my insurance university turned into unconditional, but there was no sign of change at Oxford University's decision. I thought that that was it - I didn't get in.

Luckily, in an hour or so after I checked Track, I got an email from Bellerbys with my results, and once I had them, I was so happy that I met the conditions that I did not worry about Track anymore! I went to tell my parents and my friends and I was just so happy that it's difficult for me to find words to describe this. It really is a very nice feeling to know that you have accomplished something you had worked so hard for.

Right now I am still very excited about going to Oxford University in October, although I am kept busy by the reading list that I was sent by my subject tutors. I have to read several books for each of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, so I am in a bit of a rush to try to finish them all by the time I go to Oxford! Cross fingers for me! 

Other than reading, I also started going to a driving school here - it is kind of fun to learn to drive, but it also is difficult at times when you realise the huge responsibility you have when driving a car. I've also been preparing for the driving theory tests, which is a nice way of getting my brain back into the studying mindset which I had lost completely over the summer. 

This is it then for today. I hope you are all enjoying the rest of the holidays (or the first days of school for some of you)!

I will come back very soon and talk about all the preparations I had been doing for university - again, if you'd be interested in anything specific, let me know! 

Till then!

Zuzana

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics), confirming her place at Oxford University. 

Hello Everyone!

First of all, let me say that I am very thankful to Bellerbys College for giving me the opportunity to share the experience of my first year at university with you on this blog.

My name is Zuzana Chlupackova, I'm 18 and I come from a relatively small country in Central Europe, the Czech Republic. I was postponing my first blog post until now, because until the A Level results day I was not sure which university I would go to. But now I can finally say that from October I will be reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University, and I am very excited about this!

As this is my first post ever, I was thinking to introduce myself and, most importantly, talk about the time I have spent in the UK so far, so if you feel this could be of any interest to you, read on :-).  

I was born in Vyskov, which is a small city in the Czech Republic and I lived in a tiny village called Olsany for the first year of my life (people are often surprised by this, since they say I am such a city type :-)). My family moved to Prague soon after and that's where I lived for the most part of my life.

The Czech educational system is different to the English one, so you might find it rather confusing that after the 5th grade at school I went to a selective gymnasium (an equivalent of grammar school), where I spent further five years before leaving to study in Bellerbys College Brighton in September 2009.

Before I first came to the UK, I was worried about pretty much everything - will I be able to cope with studies in English? will I make friends in an environment where I won't know anyone at first? How am I going to survive without my parents being far away? Well, if you are anything like I was, worry no more.

I'm not going to lie to you, I was homesick at the beginning, but within a few weeks I settled in very well. I didn't have to worry about not understanding English because the teachers spoke very clearly and were always willing to help. I made friends very quickly with people all over the world. And since I had internet in my lovely host family, I could contact my family on a daily basis, so sometimes, I didn't even have time to start feeling homesick. And besides, any worries I had, I could always either come to any of the teachers, or the lovely Mrs Chris Arulraj who was always there for us (thank you Mrs Chris!).

Although it really was my dream to get into Oxford University, I felt it was pretty much impossible at first (well I still feel it's a little impossible, since it still didn't quite sink in). But Bellerbys has showed me that with determination, hard work, and support from all the friendly teachers, everything was possible.

Here I must thank Mr Corcut for holding the Oxbridge meetings throughout the first four terms of my course, because they really were very useful in terms of preparation for the dreaded interviews. Thanks to these meetings the interviews went much better for me than I would have thought (If you'd like to know more about the interviews procedure, just let me know below in the comments, I could make a post about these). They were not easy, but they were not as daunting as I thought initially.

It did take a lot of hard work throughout the two years that I spent at Bellerbys. But do not be mistaken! I also had huge amounts of fun meeting various people, hanging out with friends (even studying with friends in our favourite Costa Coffee was fun!), singing in the college singing society, helping to manage various fun events for the college (the Carnival, the May Ball, etc.) in the Student Council, and so on.

Life of a student at Bellerbys is not just about studying (although this is massively important, of course) it is a lot more, and in all honesty, I think that all my friends at Bellerbys have enjoyed their courses just as much as I have (that is to say a LOT!).

So yes, this was a very brief summary of my life at Bellerbys Brighton. In the next post I will talk about my holidays (which are rather long - more than 3 months in total!) and about the preparation for university that I am faced with these days. If there is anything specific you would be interested in, I am more than happy to talk about it, so, please, let me know.

Thanks a lot for reading my first blog post!

I will be back soon!

Zuzana

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics).