My experience in the first term of my first year of the undergraduate History (BA) has been overall enjoyable. At Oxford, History is offered as a three-year humanities degree. I chose to pursue this course due to my interest in diplomacy, although many who pursue this degree are interested in going into consulting, investment banking, research, and the legal profession upon graduation.
Undergraduate History offers an unparalleled choice of modules. In fact, I was surprised to find that there are rarely any two people in the entire university who are doing the same combination of papers in any given term. From modern European diplomacy to the philosophies underpinning the existence of states, students can choose modules that fit their interests and ambitions, as long as they fulfil the geographical and chronological requirements for graduation.
In the first term of Year 1, I took the History of the British Isles paper and the Paper IV. Generally speaking, the British Isles paper is a more “straight-forward” history paper, whereas the Paper IV (which includes four options: Historiography, Approaches to History, Quantification, and Foreign Texts) tends to be more conceptual and abstract and makes the student consider how history is created. For example, the Paper IV took for this term, Anthropological Approaches to History, requires the student to consider how the two disciplines interact, as well as to tackle questions on the forces that hold societies together and how we can study them. I found this paper to be more challenging, as it requires us to familiarize ourselves with another subject.
Typically, this course requires us to write 1-2 essays a week, each essay being roughly 2,000 words in length. The tutor sends an essay with the corresponding reading list. The reading list seems like an impenetrable list of books; however, the student is not expected to incorporate all sources into the essay. Rather, it is about getting a wide range of sources to support an argument, rather than using as many sources as possible. Although one may need to go through around 12-15 books and articles to get a good understanding of the topic, only around 6-10 are necessary in the essay itself. The students are often expected to develop a thorough knowledge of a completely unfamiliar topic, form an argument, and present it to a professor who has spent their entire life studying it, all in five to six days. This, alongside the amount of reading and the marshalling of a vast array of information into an essay, are the biggest challenges with this course.
It is easy to be overwhelmed with the work and lose motivation. Therefore, I found it useful to set aside specific times during the day when I would do the reading, ensuring that I do not waste time by unproductively and passively reading sources for hours while procrastinating. By spacing out the reading throughout the five to six days, the reading becomes more manageable. Given the amount of material given, it is important to be able to quickly filter what is important and what is not important in the thousands of pages of arguments. This can be done by always having certain questions in mind when reading, rather than mindlessly reading historiographical arguments. In the end, the more thorough yet efficient the reading is, the easier the essay writing becomes. Therefore, time management and efficient yet thorough reading are crucial to managing the workload.
The tutorial is usually the “deadline” for the essays. It involves one or two students discussing their essay with the tutor. The tutors often ask thought-provoking questions which makes it challenging and reminds me of the admission interviews. However, I found that the tutorials became more useful and less stressful by seeing them as an opportunity to develop my understanding of the topic and ask relevant questions. The tutor’s probing questions should be seen as an opportunity to challenge one’s perspectives and develop their arguments further. Therefore, it is important to come with questions, as well as to read around any other relevant topic that the tutor may ask questions about. This ensures that tutorials, which are crucial in humanities courses that have limited contact hours, are as meaningful as possible.
There are certainly things that the students criticize about the course – from the lack of contact hours to the seemingly uninteresting modules that one had to take to fulfil the graduation requirements. For example, a medieval or renaissance paper, a requirement for many undergraduates to fulfil their regional and chronological requirements, may seem tedious and boring for those who are uninterested in these time periods. However, this course has been overall interesting, even if the content is indeed at times tedious. The lecturer in our first lecture said that this undergraduate course requires its students to be something “between a lawyer and a detective”. This is the aspect of the course I found the most enjoyable in these eight weeks, gathering evidence from a wide array of information, sorting out and evaluating the relevant information, and putting them together to form an argument. It is not enough to be “right”, the argument needs to be convincing. In this course, I found that the processes and skills used every week to prepare for the tutorials are as important, if not more important, as the actual historical events and debates.
I hope this has given you an insight into the History course at Oxford!