Navigating the academic experience at Oxford is perhaps the greatest challenge thus far. I’m reading for the MPhil (Masters in Philosophy) in International Relations, which is the equivalent of a masters degree in the US. It is a two year taught course that consists of a first year of coursework and essay writing, followed by a year of limited coursework and writing a 30,000-word thesis. This term I have about four two-hour classes: the main class is on the international system from 1900-1950 and there is a class in research methods and design, a statistics lecture and a lab where we learn to use statistical software. In the lecture on the international system, we are assigned a reading list every week and two questions for discussion. Each week students take turns writing essays on the question topics, they then read their essay to the class and we discuss each one for an hour. In addition, each student is assigned to a supervisor who they meet with every other week. The supervisor will assign a question for each week and you write a paper for them and then meet to discuss it (this is the famous tutorial system). So that is six papers on the international system in the span of an eight-week term and another paper on a methodological controversy in international relations for the research methods class. Oxford doesn’t have exams like we conceptualize midterms and finals in the US. At the beginning of the third term in the first year students take a Qualifying Exam to advance to the second year. The exam is scored and the grades get posted publicly but they don’t ever go on a transcript. The only test that really matters is the final examinations in the third term of the second year. This set of four three-hour exams will determine a student’s grade from Oxford.
The system of assessment is foreign enough but learning to navigate the everyday course work presents a puzzle in and of itself. Sometimes the weekly reading list is so long that is seems as though it might take a week to read the list itself. A professor explained the objective as developing mastery of a new topic for each week’s class. Apparently this requires a superhuman intuition for discerning the relevant information and locating it within a frame of reference. It sounds simple enough but the breadth of historical factors and theoretical frameworks at play during analysis is positively daunting. In the first week we were studying the causes of the First World War. So you read a few books, develop an understanding of the timeline of the war, read about how the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars shaped European perceptions of conflict in the twentieth century, and consider the domestic political, economic and social conditions that may have contributed to instability and the international insecurities fueled by imperialism, militarism, liberalism and the like. But once you start discussing the topic in class it becomes clear that the outbreak and latter settlement of the war is influenced by Britain’s colonial holdings in India, America’s perception of Manifest Destiny, the circumstances under which the state of Germany was created and more. What is unclear is the extent to which students are expected to be aware of all of these historic circumstances or merely attempt to muddle through and pick things up as we go along.
This seems to reflect a much more fundamental difference between the US and British system. In the US, students are provided with a very closely tailored body of information and expected to memorize it and regurgitate it on command. Oxford offers a much broader intellectual experience that prizes reading widely and engaging with self-selected materials. But after over 15-years of studying in a system where the material is defined and the benchmarks are clearly indicated, that level of academic freedom and corresponding responsibility is slightly terrifying. You have to decide for yourself what knowledge is important, where to find it and how to internalize it. No doubt it is a skill that is going to take some time to develop and it is clear that my fellow overachievers from universities around the world are currently sharing in my discomfort.
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