Hi friends,

I had my first primary tutorial two days ago, so this post is going to be about the tutorial system and what exactly I’m doing here at Oxford.

Here at Oxford, I don’t take regular daily classes like I do at Case Western. Instead, we take tutorials, which are essentially small hour-long meetings where you meet with a tutor, who is either a student getting his or her D.Phil (doctorate) from Oxford, or has recently received it and is now working full-time as a professor. The tutorials are usually either one-on-one or two-on-one, with another student being present. You will never have more than three students in a tutorial, which means there is a lot of individualized attention.

These tutorials do not involve daily lectures or classes like Case Western. Instead, we spend the entire week before the tutorial reading a series of books and/or articles that the tutor has provided us beforehand and we craft our own essays based on what we’ve researched. It’s very independent, with no one around to really guide you along the way. The night before the tutorial, you email your essay in to the professor, and when your tutorial time comes around, you spend the hour of the tutorial going over the essay – your ideas, your thought process, and how you brought everything together to create the essay. Tutorials allow you to receive personalized, focused feedback on your writing.

You take two tutorials per term, a primary tutorial and a secondary tutorial. The primary tutorial meets every week for eight weeks (terms are eight weeks long), while your secondary tutorial meets four times out of the eight weeks. The primary tutorial translates back to eight credit hours, and the secondary tutorial translates back to four, so in total, I’m earning 12 credit hours per term, for three terms. This is actually really nice – at home, I usually earn 38 credits per year since I take 19 credits every semester for two semesters. By the time I finish up here at Oxford, I’ll have earned 36 credits, which is only two credit hours shorter than what I’ve done in the past in a single year.

My primary tutorial this term is Political Sociology. I am taking the class with a PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) student named Martin, and my tutor graduated with her D. Phil in sociology from Oxford a few years ago. It’s been really wonderful so far – my tutor is letting Martin and I pick the topics weekly, and during the tutorial itself, it was nice to get to talk through my essay and explain my arguments and the thought process behind how I wrote it. It’s certainly rigorous and demanding, as well as slightly nerve-wracking, but I’m loving it.

My secondary tutorial is International Relations in the Era of the Cold War, and I’ll actually be taking it by myself at St. Antony’s, another college within Oxford. This happens a lot – many students will often take their tutorials at other colleges within Oxford if no one else at your home college (in my case, Teddy Hall) is teaching the tutorial that term. I will not be starting my secondary tutorial for another week.

In addition to tutorials, there are supplemental lectures every week held in the Examination Schools. There are also additional seminars that the PPE department hosts weekly (even though I am studying Politics and History here, with Politics being my primary subject, I am still considered a PPE student, even though I’m not studying philosophy or economics).

All right, I think I’ve procrastinated from my political culture and social capital essay long enough. I’ll blog again in a few days!

Much love,

Tasha