From A-level to Oxford

Probably for the first time, you are required to seek out the answers to essay questions yourself rather than being told what to say by a textbook or a teacher

Charlie Bowden is a 1st Year BA History student at Jesus College. He is the Music sub-section editor at The Oxford Student and a frequent contributor to The Oxford Blue as well as a student ambassador for Jesus College.

For many students university signifies a major switch in their approach to learning and the intensity of the Oxford term only magnifies this experience. It’s understandable for many freshers to feel overwhelmed by the expectations of this unique system of study. Probably for the first time, you are required to seek out the answers to essay questions yourself rather than being told what to say by a textbook or a teacher. That shift might seem daunting to an outsider but once in Oxford you soon realise how naturally you get into the swing of things.

For myself and many other students the Oxford-style tutorial structure is quite a stark change from the norm. We have spent the past few years submerged in the ideology of GCSE and A-level study, where teachers cram facts into students’ heads as quickly as possible and rely on tried-and-tested essay structures to get them through exams. Gone are the exam board-approved textbooks and ten-year-old revision PowerPoints when essays and exams are looming. Instead you are expected to digest a vast quantity of information and funnel it into a 2000-word essay all by yourself. The answers to complex questions are no longer made clear to you by neatly-written topic summaries or fill-in-the-blank paragraph formats. You have to search for a conclusion yourself, write a somewhat convincing essay about it and then spend an hour with your tutor where everything you wrote or thought about in the past week is intensely scrutinised. It’s a lot to take in, given that it’s essentially the reverse of how a typical A-level History essay would be formed. How could you write a whole piece about a topic without somebody there to tell you about it? Your first few weeks at Oxford will be a trial by fire in essence to test this theory.

The first thing to remember is that every History student, especially close to the start of a module, will look at an essay question in utter despair because they have no clue about how to answer it before they begin reading. Questions are often either very specific or very vague with no in between and both question styles have their respective challenges. While studying at Oxford, especially in a subject like History where there are so few contact hours, it often feels like you’re the only person who’s struggling and that is absolutely not the case. If you could answer every question your degree throws at you without any stress there would be no point in studying here. Especially at the beginning it’s a difficult system to get the hang of and it’s important to reach out to your fellow students for advice and to your tutors if you are having difficulty getting to grips with the work.

Reading lists are of course the most useful thing to get an idea for how to answer a question. Your tutor will have selected a range of articles and books most relevant to the essay question at hand. If you’re lucky, they will have highlighted certain texts as the most important ones to read or the more accessible ones to ease yourself into the topic. Beyond their suggestions you can always check the Faculty reading list for your module. This will have a more expansive list of reading recommendations with a broader focus than the selections your tutor has made. Personally I often find starting with the articles is a good idea because the information is more condensed than a full book and they can point you to interesting historiographical debates you could explore in your later reading and, eventually, your essay. Don’t spend too much time reading and not enough writing though; most tutors recommend around six articles and books is enough background to build a good essay.

This topsy-turvy system of learning about a topic in a tutorial after you’ve already written an essay on it might seem odd but remember that your historical understanding is a work in progress and those essays are not static repositories of knowledge. You might not have been able to use the tips from the tutorial in your essay but they will undoubtedly come in handy when you are confronted with a similar question in an exam. Essay feedback is very useful to channel into your later work, even if it is on a completely different topic.

The jump from A-level (or equivalent qualifications) to an Oxford History degree might seem overwhelming at first glance, and it certainly takes some getting used to in those first few weeks. But remember that you will be taking that leap with hundreds of other students who will all be feeling the exact same way. Oxford has a reputation for academic excellence which can seem stifling at times, like you’ve got to live up to some mystical notion of amazing work quality, but take it one step at a time, be smart about how you spend your time and you’ll be totally fine. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can make that transition - I’ve only been doing tutorial essays for seven weeks and already I feel so much more confident that I know what to do and how to do it in this system.