Key concepts: Academic record; References; Written work; Proposal/Study plan; Research element; Submitted applications;
A student wishing to read for one of the graduate degrees under the auspices of the History Faculty at Oxford University must first be assessed and admitted by the Faculty Board of History. The Faculty's offer of a place includes the guarantee of a college place, although not necessarily in an applicant's preferred college. The Faculty considers applications for all the graduate programmes it administers by the November and January application deadlines. In its specialist programmes in Economic and Social History and in History of Science and Medicine, the Faculty will also consider applications received by the March deadline, provided there is still faculty and college capacity available. Applicants for doctoral research in these areas are expected to indicate clearly how their projects fit both thematically and methodologically into these specialist fields. – Prospective applicants should note, though, that they need to apply by the January deadline if they wish to be considered for funding administered through the Faculty (including AHRC and ESRC awards).
You may wish to consult the relevant programme entries in this modular handbook, as well as the Programme Specifications and Statements of Provision for our graduate programmes, before submitting your application.
Entrance requirements and assessment criteria – for admissions and funding
Your application needs to convince us that you have the qualities we are looking for. We will use the evidence on your application as a basis for deciding not only whether to offer you a place, but also whether to nominate you for certain kinds of funding: AHRC or ESRC awards (for home/EU students) or Clarendon/ORS funding (for students from outside the EU). These awards are very competitive: currently (as of 2008-9) we anticipate that only about one third of the doctoral students and one tenth of the master’s students we will ultimately admit will be fully funded through us. It is therefore very important that you make every effort to make a good case for yourself. All applicants for funding and all doctoral applicants should pay special attention to what we say below about developing the research element in your proposal.
Overall, what we want to have demonstrated to us by your application is your
- capacity to work at a high intellectual level
- preparedness for your proposed programme of study
- ability to identify and formulate an appropriate research project (not essential for admission to all master’s programmes, but – other things being equal – excellence in this regard will always increase your competitiveness for funding)
- fit with our programme and supervisory capacity
Please note that one condition of admitting you is our ability to find a qualified supervisor who has spare capacity and can take you on – either in the History faculty or in another part of the university. We will make every effort to identify appropriate supervisors for well qualified students, but every year we have to reject a small number of applicants on this ground alone. You should therefore also make some effort to check that your research interests map on to what we can offer. You should not try to recruit your own supervisor: the faculty appoints supervisors on the basis of our assessment of their fit with your research interests and their spare teaching-capacity; but you should check that your interests match our expertise. Information about faculty research interests and a list of faculty members (including people whose main jobs are in other faculties) can be found on the History WebSite.
The table shows how we expect to use the evidence you submit to test these points:
| Academic record | References | Written work | Proposal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level of work | X | X | X | X |
| Preparedness | X | X | X | X |
| Project | possibly | X | ||
| Academic fit | X |
When we assess your preparedness we will not necessarily expect you already to have all the skills you will need for your programme and project: you will doubtlessly be hoping to develop these skills further within the programme. See details of our master’s programmes for more information about the forms of training they provide. For information about general training opportunities open to all history graduate students, see the framework for graduate learning, and research support, training and personal development opportunities.
We do not routinely interview applicants. If we do talk to you, face to face or on the telephone, the object of the discussion will normally be to clarify certain aspects of your application. We normally expect to make our decision about whether to admit you and whether to allocate you funding entirely on the basis of the written evidence you submit. Those who are still enrolled in a degree programme relevant to the programme of study they are applying for must expect to receive a conditional offer only, and the Faculty will set a required completion level in accordance with its assessment of the individual applicant. The criteria outlined below are considered to be minimum achievement levels, and the actual condition set by the Faculty’s academic assessors in individual cases may well be higher than this guidance.
Below we explain more precisely what we are looking for as we scan each piece of evidence.
Academic record
All applicants:
- ability to sustain high levels of performance across the board; we hope applicants will attain average marks placing them in the top third of the 2.i class, or a GPA of 3.70/4.00
- very strong marks (at this level or above) in courses particularly relevant to the programme
- very strong marks for any dissertation element
- good background in knowledge and skills relevant to the programme: we would normally expect your previous degree programme to have had some historical content; the less your record displays this, the more you will need to do to establish your preparedness in other aspects of your application
As relevant:
- applicants for master’s degrees will be expected to have attained BA Hons equivalent before starting the programme (outside the UK, this normally entails at least four years of full-time study)
- applicants for doctoral degrees will be expected to have completed a postgraduate master’s course or the equivalent before starting the programme (in European terms: M2 level)
- applicants whose native language is not English must
submit language test results
o IELTS: an overall score of 7.5, with at least 7.0 in each component.
o TOEFL: an overall score of 630 with a Test of Written English score of 5. – Applicants who have taken the computer-based TOEFL test must achieve an overall score of 267 with an essay-writing score of 5. – Applicants who have taken the new Internet-based TOEFL test must achieve an overall score of 109
o Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) Grade B.
References
We encourage you to find referees who can write above all about your academic qualities: It will be helpful if your referees can not only assess your qualities and attainments, but also explain on what basis they make this assessment.
We want to know from them whether they think that you:
- have the qualities of mind and character that you will need to pursue your degree programme to a successful conclusion
- have appropriate background knowledge and skills for your programme and your proposed research project
If you have already begun or completed a research project, it will be helpful if your referees can write about the skills and aptitudes you have shown in that connection.
Submitted work
You may submit either two pieces of written work of approx. 2000 words each, or one longer essay of up to 5,000 words (in the latter case you should upload instead of the second essay a short statement, perhaps saying "I have submitted one long essay in lieu of the two short essays, as permitted by the Faculty of History". This will enable you to indicate on the checklist at the end of the application form that you have submitted both the first and second piece of written work, and thus fulfilled the application conditions for History).
In choosing what work to submit, you should bear in mind that when we read it we will be trying to establish:
- whether you can write effective English academic prose (what you submit must be your work, or your translation of your work, not a translation completed for you by someone else)
- whether your work is of an appropriate intellectual standard: e.g. whether it shows good historical understanding, conceptual sophistication, analytical and critical skill, and the ability to sustain a cogent argument
- whether you have appropriate background knowledge and technical (e.g. language, quantitative) skills for your chosen programme (it may of course be appropriate for you to develop such skills further during the programme)
The more highly we rate your work in all these regards, the more likely we are to nominate you for funding.
It is not essential that the written work you submit relates closely to your proposed research project – you may rely wholly upon your proposal to establish your grasp of the relevant field, but if you do have work of a high standard that is relevant to your proposed research, in terms of subject matter, method, or in any other way, it would be sensible to send us that.
Proposal/Statement of Purpose/Study Plan
In general we would emphasise (contrary to what seem to be common North American expectations) that we are not so much interested in your personal story as in your academic potential. All applications will be read and carefully evaluated by specialists. You don’t need to catch our attention. What you do need to do is to convince us that you have the right intellectual qualities, academic knowledge and skills (this should not take more than between 500 and 1,000 words).
You should explain:
- how you see the programme you are applying for as building upon your previous study, and what you hope to do with the qualifications you gain from us
- what kinds of problems and issues you hope to engage with during the programme; what the current state of your knowledge and understanding of these is, and how you hope to advance that
If you are a master’s applicant, you should:
- indicate what optional or advanced paper classes you are interested in taking
- give enough of an indication of your individual research
interests to make it possible for us to identify an
appropriate supervisor (note that if you subsequently
change your mind about what you want to research, you
will need the faculty’s approval to change your subject).
We recognise that applicants for some specialist master’s training courses – especially Economic and Social History and History of Art – may not yet have sufficient discipline-specific knowledge to do that. - However, if you wish to be considered for an AHRC or ESRC award you should take account of what these bodies require as a ‘case for support’.
- You may find some guidance from ‘Developing the research element in your proposal’, although we will not expect this proposal to be as developed for a master’s applicant as for a doctoral candidate.
If you are a doctoral applicant, you should:
- submit a developed research proposal, as described
below. We will regard this as crucial evidence of your
readiness for doctoral research
Developing the research element in your proposal
Doctoral work involves three or four years of preparation, research and writing. To demonstrate that you are equipped for this you will need to formulate a developed research proposal. Even if you cannot cover all the elements outlined below, you will improve your chances if you can cover at least some of the points listed. It is essential for everyone who wishes to be considered for an AHRC or ESRC award to pay careful regard to these instructions.
If you want to preface the research proposal in your admissions application with some introductory remarks about your background and the reasons why you are making your application, you must make it clear where the research proposal proper starts. If Faculty and University agree to shortlist you for AHRC or ESRC funding we will have to ask you for a final version of a developed research proposal which must not exceed 4,000 characters including spaces, or c. 600 words (this is an AHRC requirement, but in any case your ability to prioritise and select, so that you can cover a lot of ground in a short space, is one ability that is being tested). Within this word limit, your proposal should supply all of the following:
- a research question: the central issue or problem with which you intend to grapple
- historiography: some account of the current state of scholarship in this area. You may want to explain why you are dissatisfied with existing scholarship: is it limited, dated or unconvincing? what kind of contribution will your work make?
- sources: an indication of the kinds of sources you expect to use, where these can be found, how they will contribute to your research, what if any technical skills you will need to work with them (e.g. language, quantitative, use of specialist software), and whether you already have those skills or will need to acquire them
- method: thinking about your approach to dealing with sources and constructing your thesis. Some of the following considerations may apply. At what level is your inquiry: micro or local, regional or national, comparative or transnational? Will you be using qualitative or quantitative techniques? Samples or case studies? Will your research draw on a body of theory? Does your approach drawn on the agenda or methods of related disciplines such as anthropology, sociology or literary studies?
Be as precise and concrete as you can – though be assured that assessors will bear in mind that what you are submitting is a proposal for research yet to be undertaken.
It will be normal for your ideas
subsequently to change in some ways as you investigate the
evidence and develop your project. You should nonetheless
make the best effort you can to demonstrate the extent of
your research question, historiographical engagement,
sources and method at this moment.
After submitting an
application
Notification. Applicants will be informed if their application is incomplete or has arrived too late to be considered. If the application has arrived in time, the Faculty aims to inform you of the outcome by mid-January (for November applications) and late March (for January applications), and mid-May (for March applications). Possible outcomes of the faculty’s academic decision-making procedure are: acceptance without further academic conditions; acceptance conditional on certain academic or linguistic requirements relevant to the individual applicant; held over for further consideration with next application cohort; placed on a waiting list (an option only at the end of the final deadline for your programme of study); unsuccessful. All applicants accepted by the faculty are guaranteed an offer of a college place, though not necessarily in their college of first choice. Notification by the college, outlining any financial implications of the offer, will follow after a further interval: do not feel that you need to wait for this before committing yourself to study at Oxford, if Oxford is your preferred university.
Unsuccessful applications. Most of our applicants have achieved, or are expected to achieve our minimum entry requirements outlined above. However, as our capacity for taking on students is limited it is in the nature of things that a large number of them cannot be offered a place. The competition for places happens at a very demanding level, and we also need to take care that offers of places fit our available academic expertise. We therefore ask unsuccessful applicants to keep in mind that well-qualified candidates may not be offered a place because:
- the proposed research would be more appropriately pursued in another specialist centre;
- there are constraints on the availability of research facilities, research funding and supervision expertise;
- there are limitations on the size of master’s programmes and classes;
- other candidates have been judged to have even greater academic ability;
- secure funding is not available (places offered on a conditional basis will not be confirmed without a financial guarantee);
- colleges may not have places available.
It should also be noted that acceptance on a particular programme gives no guarantee of final success, and all programmes require the student to develop their learning and skills to new levels in order to pass master’s examinations or successfully to undertake all the assessment hurdles of a research programme.
International students and UK visa requirements. The UK is currently introducing a new, points-based immigration procedure which also governs the issuing of student visas (entry clearance). Prospective international students are therefore strongly advised to keep themselves informed about the requirements of their visa applications. Oxford University's International Students Advisory Service have generated a WebSite which explains in what ways the University will be able to support the Points-based Immigration System.
Background reading for master's programmes. Students wishing to undertake some preliminary reading for their programmes should consult bibliographies on the faculty website: see the faculty’s on-line Graduate Handbook, Post-graduate papers in History.
Advance contact with supervisors. All applicants offered places as research students will be told the name of the supervisor assigned to them; if not informed in their offer letters, students may obtain this information from History Graduate Admissions. Students who have accepted offers and fulfilled all conditions and who wish to undertake some preliminary work specifically in relation to their intended dissertations – in the form of background reading, preliminary research or training – may wish to make advance contact with supervisors (most supervisors’ e-mail addresses can be obtained through http://www.ox.ac.uk/contact/). Note however that supervisors may not be able to respond quickly to such enquiries, either because of pressure of teaching commitments during term, or because they are absent on research trips during the vacation. Students are encouraged to let supervisors know the exact date of their arrival in Oxford, when that is clearly established, and to make contact indicating their availability for a meeting promptly after their arrival (again on the understanding that supervisors may not be free to arrange a meeting until the start of term).
Deferrals. Applicants who meet all academic and financial conditions will be issued with a student contract. After accepting this contract, students may apply to defer entry to a later term, or to the next academic year. Such deferrals will not be granted lightly – usually only for sound academic or health reasons. Since entry is competitive, students may be required to compete again in the context of a subsequent applicant cohort. Any enquiries about the possibility of deferring should be directed to the History Graduate Office.
Funding opportunities. As indicated earlier, scholarships in the gift of Faculty and University will be considered as part of the admissions assessment, but it is important that you are aware that currently many Oxford graduate students are substantially self-funding, and opportunities to earn money on course are very limited. You may, however, wish to consult our report on funding opportunities, which also provides information about funding resources not in the gift of University, Humanities Division, or Faculty.
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