Criticism from The Crimson

SteveUK
Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:00:38 +0000

Inaina, when I say that you go into more depth, I mean only that you learn more of your subject. So an Oxford biochemist leaves Oxford having learnt more biochemistry than a Harvard student who majored in it (how much more, I don’t know). I really wouldn’t like to go any further than this because I don’t want to descend into the realms of subjectivity and prejudice. The other benefits of Oxbridge don’t really come into what I mean by ‘depth’.

Since an example will mean more to you than rhetoric, I’ll tell you what I studied for my ‘Medical Sciences’ degree during my 3 years at Cambridge. I had 6 days of lectures per week (Mon-Sat), an average of 2-4 hours of practical classes per day, and on top of that 3-5 hours of supervisions with academics per week. We were expected to read our coursebooks in advance of the practicals, which sometimes took a long time (e.g. for anatomy it took at least an hour). We also had to either produce an essay or complete a worksheet for each supervision, depending on the subject and the inclination of the supervisor. The academics who supervise you can be anywhere from a PhD student to a Nobel Prize winner. It really does vary a lot, depending on the college’s strength in that discipline, but for me, most of my supervisors were ‘Readers’ - a Reader is higher than an average ‘Professor’ (using the American technology) but lower than someone with a Professorial chair (the only way to be called a Professor in Britain). Personally, I wrote 3 essays per week in my first year on anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, and had some one-off essay assignments in medical sociology, epidemiology and medical statistics. In my second year I wrote 4 essays per week on neuroscience, pharmacology, pathology and reproductive science, with a couple of one-off essays on topics in medical ethics. We did work exceptionally hard and we focused 100% on topics related to medical science. I can accept that there are other places in the world where people work as hard - but harder? Frankly, that blows my mind. In the third year we chose one scientific discipline (I went for neuroscience) and worked only in that area, and it was a lot more chilled. We carried out one research project, and spent the rest of the time attending lectures (only about 6 per weel) and then reading scientific papers referenced during those lectures (but this was quite a task, because there could be up to 10 references in a single lecture, and while some of these were short, some were up to 50 pages long - no kidding, have a look at the Journal of Physiology and you’ll see!). After reading the references, we wrote essays on titles that we came up with ourselves and then discussed them with the lecturer concerned for about an hour (in practice, most lecturers were happy to provide possible essay titles!!). I’m sure none of this sounds alien compared to what you do in the States, but my point is that we focus 100% on our area and we really do go for it. There is no room for saying you can make up for this difference in a liberal arts course by working harder, because quite simply we worked flat-out already, even in the vacation periods. I know liberal arts degrees are a year longer, but correct me if I’m wrong, the liberal arts emphasis extends beyond the first year? I do actually have a friend from Cambridge who took a Harvard course on biochemistry while on the Cambridge-MIT exchange, and his impression was that the course was superficial compared to the biochemistry we learnt in the first year, even though this was a third year course. That’s another point actually, he took a third year course because he was currently in his second year at Cambridge - and this was one of MIT’s rules, not his own choice.

Anyway, I’ve now gone rather further than I intended and will probably receive some more private hatemail from Hedoya, but you did ask, and I provided…