Oxford PPE vs. Georgetown SFS vs. Amherst Poli Sci + Econ

Twoin18
Tue, 24 Mar 2020 20:33:49 +0000

A couple of thoughts on your concerns about Oxford.

School spirit: There is a very active rivalry between colleges, expressed to a large degree through sports, especially rowing (you’ll see lots of chalk on the walls in most colleges celebrating the crews who won oars in the bumps). Most UK students don’t have anything like the same depth of involvement in sports as US students (and aren’t selected for talent in it), so college sports are great to get involved with completely from scratch (90%+ of rowers won’t have done it before) and make friends. My number 1 piece of advice would be to get involved with a college sports club in your first term. Don’t just think “OMG I’ll have so much work to do that I can’t possible take on something like rowing at 6am in the morning”. Start doing something at the beginning - its always better to drop it or scale it down later than find after the first year on that you haven’t got involved in enough social activities to take your mind off the work. There was an Oxford PPE student on here last fall who felt after the first year that he hadn’t fit in (albeit not at a somewhat more egalitarian college like Catz) and wondered about transferring back to the US as a result, though I guess he stuck it out. See http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/transfer-students/2154109-going-from-oxford-back-to-us-for-finishing-bachelors-what-econ-programs-should-i-apply.html#latest for his thread.

Drinking: Yes, its a big part of British and college culture. You’ll almost always be offered sherry or wine at college organized welcome events. But the college bars, which are a big part of the social scene, have got a lot more inclusive since I was there - now they serve nice coffee, sandwiches etc, not just beer. And there are now more students who don’t drink for health or religious reasons, so I think this is less of a stigma than it used to be. I don’t think the typical US college kids are drinking far less, they are just running more of a risk of getting arrested for it.

Short terms: Definitely its very intense. Plan to spend a couple of weeks of each vacation catching up on all the work you didn’t quite keep on top of in the last few weeks of term. Be aware that your tutorial work doesn’t count towards grades and there isn’t the same number of midterms and final exams for each course in each term that you’d have in the US, which can be both good and bad. You know when the exams are and you prepare everything for them (British students are used to that because it’s how A levels work). So the key skill is to be able to revise very intensively for several weeks covering a huge amount of material for an exhausting set of lengthy exams that take place over just a few days (and write very fast - it would be quite typical to crank out four 10 page handwritten essays in a 3 hour exam). That’s where you need to take advantage of having time in the (relatively long) vacations between terms to catch up and make sure that you’ve learned everything properly (so you’ll remember what was covered in an October lecture when you have an exam on it in June).