Hello and welcome to the Queen's Access podcast. It's so lovely to have you here.
And I hope you find this a useful resource in learning more about life at Oxford.
But more specifically about life at the Queen's College.
My guests this week are Frances Lawson, a second year studying Spanish and beginners, Russian, Austin Haines, a second year studying English.
And Jessica, when a third jam material scientists,
the four of us will have a chat about tutorials at Queen's and generally how our academic lives work.
My apologies for any poor audio. These interviews have all been conducted over Zoome, and the Internet connexion isn't always completely reliable.
For a transcript of this episode, please visit the Queen's website. I hope you enjoy.
Hi, everyone. I hope you're doing well and thank you so much for agreeing to be part of this podcast.
I'm really excited to record with you guys to start us off.
Could you tell me a little bit about your queen's journey? So how did you end up in college?
Francis, you wanna go first? Yeah. Okay. So I went.
I care. I come from Hackney in East London. I went to a so middling state, comprehensive.
That was nothing particularly amazing about it. There was nothing terrible about it.
And it was why I was there. And my language teacher in year 11 was the first person to really plant the idea.
Oh, have you maybe thought about applying for Oxford or Cambridge? When the time comes?
I think you stand a decent chance. And I sort of humoured in for a bit,
but I didn't really ever think of it as being a really serious possibility
until I put I put it down in the application and went along with the stages.
Still just thinking it would be great. It would be a great experience, just the interview process.
And then I kept getting further and further and ended up in.
Ended up here. So I loved Queens when I came to visit on the open day. And I thought it was definitely the college that suited me best.
And yeah, that's how I ended up here. Really. Oh, fantastic.
How about yours then? Oh, yeah. So I'm from Tom Makoto Auckland in Ontario in New Zealand.
I also spent a lot of time living in Melbourne, in Australia. So I kind of maybe a year or so before coming to Oxford,
I decided I wanted to study in the UK just to various reasons about how uni courses instruction.
You can also I a little bit of family over in the UK. I mean, also, I'm kind of lucky enough to come from a background.
My family is able to kind of pay for me to study overseas. I suppose my kind of journey and kind of coming to Queens was a bit of an
arbitrary choice because you couldn't have like a really good music programme,
which was really attractive to me. Typically pretty college in the cohort for English students, it's quite small.
So that was all attractive to me. And a few things kind of ended up happening and I ended up ending up in Queen's just because of music and stuff.
Yeah. Lovely. And Jazz, what about you?
So I came from a private school in southeast London kind of cat area, and I was there on a bursary and a scholarship.
So that school was very kind of intent on sending people to Oxbridge.
So we had a lot of support, which I was really lucky with.
So how I ended up at Queen's. So I study material science and because it's a really small course.
Only seven colleges do materials. So that means that I had very little choice to start off with.
Which is actually quite a good thing because I was kind of less overwhelmed when
it came to open day and I knew kind of which colleges that I had to go to see.
So I had kind of a selection criteria in mind.
The biggest one was like accommodation.
So I wanted accommodation for all four years of my course just because I didn't want to think about, like renting and stuff.
So Queens is one of the colleges that offers four years of accommodation.
And then I went round the colleges that did offer accommodation for all four years.
And I just really like Queens the best. The library just took my breath away.
So I was like, this is the college for me. Oh, fantastic.
Yeah. The library. The library is insane. So this episode is focussed on one of most important aspects of being an Oxford student,
which is the tutorials, which is really what makes Oxford quite unique amongst a lot of institutions.
So for each of you guys, let's start off by saying,
how many tutors did you have and all your tutorials organised by your college or by your department?
So, Austin, do you want to start us off? Yeah. So I had four shooters in my first year at roughly the same thing across each of my three years.
Most of my shoes were organised within college.
So with tutors from my college who teach all the students at Queen's every now and then
you'll get sent to another college to work with a tutor is an expert in that subject.
For example, like my 19th century literature paper, there wasn't anybody that was qualified to take on out of.
And so I got to go to prison. This college about five minutes walk up the High Street to work with a tutor who was a specialist in the.
Yeah. FOB Francis. How about you? Yeah. And so I do Spanish and Russian.
So my degrees and say split between the two. I have so in my first year, I have two Spanish Tutsis and three Russian shooters.
Each language is tends to be split into the language side of that, of course.
And the literature side of the course said the literature side was organised in college.
So my Spanish roots are in my Spanish literature.
Tutorials took place at Queens, whereas my Spanish language tutorials and oral classes also place in the modern languages.
Faculty and the Russian up initiate courses almost completely centralised.
So all of my tutorials that took place in the modern languages faculty with the two Russian tutors there.
But in the set in the third and fourth years after the Arab world,
when you start literature, it will it's all of the literature is based with the teacher.
It's Edmund Hall, which is just across the road as quinson and will share a Russian shooter.
Okay, up. I'm just. How about you? So in first year, I have about five or six tutors, I believe.
So with materials, because, again, it's quite small. Most of the tutorials are kind of set a certain time.
It's organised within the college, but it generally follows the lecture courses, which is done by the departments.
So with Queens, we actually share tutors and materials between Mansfield and when I was in first year, also Corpus.
But then because the year is expanding, I think Corpus pulled out.
But we still share tutors with Mansfield, which means that I think there are about five tutors in total that you'll get to tutorials with.
And depending on the speciality of the tutor, you'll have like tutorials with the tutor who knows the subject the best.
Yes, that's pretty much it, right? Yeah. So for me.
So like jazz, I'm a STEM student, but chemistry is a massive department in comparison to materials.
And so we have 170 students every year. So this year I had four tutors and I'm not because I have the three subdisciplines of chemistry.
And I also took a maths scores in first year and afters after this year.
I get back down to three tutors and my tutorials are organised within college.
But maths is departmentally for chemistry, so we all get given the same problem sheets and we all have a one hour maths class every week.
So my maths teacher tutored at multiple colleges. Yeah.
So our maths can be quite, quite tough by the department.
But generally for chemistry, it's quite college lad in terms of the other the other tutorials.
So what kind of work do you have to do in preparation for each tutorial that you have?
So Jess, can you start us off? Yeah. So I think generally for STEM students we have problem sheets.
So probably states that usually just that just a list of problems really.
It can take anywhere between like five to eight hours for me, depending on how badly I understand.
But yeah. So for materials, they're set by the lecturer.
But then you take them to your tutor, which is usually run by your college.
Yes, Frances, how about you? Yes, sir.
And the Spanish literature tutorials. They work on an alternating best this week by week.
So we take two weeks on each, two weeks on each and text.
We study the first week we would be given a set of passages or poems to look at and analyse,
and we'd be asked to read them beforehand and kind of pick through absolutely
everything that we would what we would think was noteworthy in the extracts.
And then in the other week, we would write an essay on the on a question that is set about that text.
And then we would go on to discuss that in the tutorial.
So we'd write the essay beforehand and then get it back with feedback in the tutorial for language for Spanish.
We would normally just get prescribed grammar, reading or grammar exercises to finish.
And then sometimes some translations that we would have to write and then send off to the speech to the tutor.
And then the Russian.
Most of the most of the begin, at most, the beginners Russian course in the first year is run based on the best on one particular textbook.
So before each lesson or at the start of each week, we get a set of exercises from the unit that we'd be looking at that week.
And we just get told that by each day you have to have done X number of exercises
and then we go through them and correct them in the in the in the session.
Brilliant. And Austin, what about you?
Like I said, for English, what happens is kind of each week you'll have a kind of group of texts or that you'll have to study in that week.
So the week before you'll get that kind of assignment sheet from your tutor will say something like.
So next week we're going to be talking about maybe prerequisite poetry.
And so you'll be looking at for at a dance over a city.
And William Morris, maybe. So you have the list of writers you're studying and then you have you probably can essay questions or maybe something like.
Talk about mediaevalism and poetry.
And then in addition to that, you have like a two page, two pages of kind of suggested reading for you to do your research notes.
Yes, sir. And so in the week that you have to write your essay, I generally spend about two days panicking because I know nothing.
I don't think I'm thinking that I'm personally God, but nobody.
Come on. Go to the library or spend two or three days reading as much as I can.
Then I'll put together an essay and I'll send that to my truth that the day before.
Then on the day of the shoot, you kind of rock up wanting to kind of discuss your story.
So in that time, you've you've got your essay. You've done your reading and your research.
You develop an argument. You put your essay together and then you go to the troops.
Had to defend your argument. Brilliant. Yeah, I think it's interesting as well because it's so different from my experience.
So I'm similar to jazz and the eye problem sheets based.
But the difference to me is that my maths sheets, the department style,
and they followed electricals chronologically, but for organic and inorganic they share.
I didn't necessarily always have the tutorials after I'd finished at covering the topics and lectures.
So in a way, more like a humanities student, I often do quite a bit of prereading before I start my cheat sheets,
which was always interesting because it meant it made the tutorial sheet perhaps more challenging.
But also it is then really, really good because you wanted to the lectures with a baseline understanding or read a man.
You really understood the lectures and a lot of detail. So that's just based on teachers preferences and what hours they work and
things like that in terms of in what order you'll have tutorials vs. lectures.
So, for example, I had most of my organic tutorials before I'd done the electrical says.
But that's because at the start of first year in can, what they currently do is they start you off with quite a lot of physics and maths,
because that's generally why people have to kind of catch up to close a gap between people
who've done different A-levels as you actually start organic cam until later on in the term.
Obviously, they still want to run the tutorials. They still want you to be getting that understanding.
So you often do the tutorials before you've actually covered it much. But yeah, it just what I was definitely based on different teachers preferences.
So you talked a little bit about it already. But what happens in your standard tutorial?
So, Francis, can you can you start us off. OK. So in a Spanish literature tutorial, once we've brought in obviously the pre rating that we've done,
all the essay that we've done and get that back with some feedback. Plus,
the tutorial is directed by a worksheet that we would get given that largely consists of various
different quotes from critics about the text that we're studying at stake in that particular week.
And essentially, we would all take it intends to go through to look at each quarter in particular, look at each core index and really.
I agree with that challenge, let's have a discussion and a debate between us, and sometimes if we've done an essay for that tutorial,
sometimes some of the sometimes the tutor will let particular quotes out of your out of your essay and said,
say, Francis, in your essay, you mentions such and such.
Can you either explain on this, explain this, justified this develop this point further or maybe even challenge it.
So that's how most it's very discussion based.
For the and for the Spanish side. And then on the Russian side, we would take a look at the time.
Each week is dedicated to focussing on new grammar points and also new areas of vocabulary.
So we would spend a lot of time doing doing grammar exercises and doing vocab
building exercises to put into practise the rules that we sort of get stuck.
We get to grips with that stuff on our own over the weekend and then we spend the whole week just putting them into practise.
And we dedicate a lot of time as well to oral practise.
And we do a lot of reading poems or even sometimes doing role play exercises just to start and getting comfortable with speaking
in Russian and practising spontaneity because the oral exam is one of the exams that you take at the end of the first year.
So that's a skill that they really focus on building. That sounds really good.
I think I like the fact that the difference between the two. I think that's really interesting.
The highlight is the fact that you take a language that you're very familiar with and a language is a beginner.
And I think that's that's a really interesting contrast. Austin, how about you?
So a standard tutorial for me is a machine is generally a tutorial.
I would have written an essay beforehand and kind of done my research and become like an expert in the topic.
In the time I've had and I'm usually doing a shoot with one or two other students who've done the same essay.
So you get to you kind of basically chat about your essay with the tutor and the other students there,
and you kind of ask questions and the tutor will ask you questions to kind of push your
knowledge and kind of test how you're kind of arguments will work under pressure,
which is usually a kind of really interesting opportunity to kind of test out your ideas with somebody who's an expert in their field.
And also the kind of you to compare your ideas with those students around you who you've kind of gotten to work with over the last few months.
Other things you might do,
you might kind of discuss a lecture the tutor knows you've seen or you might have discussed some articles you think of them beforehand.
So two is really kind of an opportunity as an English shooting to take your ideas further,
to kind of get them an extra stage of refining from the essay written.
Yeah, I got you. And Jeff's what about you? So having handed in the work like a couple of days before the shoot.
Usually the tutor then gives the white back marked to us in the tutorial.
So there's usually two or three people putting it. Plus the plus the tutor.
And then we go through the questions that we didn't really understand or didn't like, didn't get right.
And so it depends. This all depends on the tutor.
So some teachers would prefer to go through the questions themselves.
Some teachers would ask people who understood the question to then go up and show everyone else how to do it.
But most of the time, it's just a discussion base.
So, like, they try and prod us to apply the knowledge that we've learnt in lectures to try and get to grips with the questions that we were given.
Mm hmm. Yeah. For me and my standard tutorial, there's usually two or three of us.
But I'm for maths classes for me. It's all of us. And even then I say about there's five of us in my year.
So it's not like there's loads and loads of people. But yeah.
So we are class sizes vary depending on what the charter is about.
And yes, similar to Jass, most of the time we just go through the problem.
She sometimes with students explaining, sometimes to the teacher explaining.
And then also what my tutors will often do is they'll bring either extra resources or extra
questions or they'll try and contextualise some of the work we've done in current research.
So sometimes my tutors might say, actually, you know, here's a current research topic that's still being debated that vaguely relates to this.
What's your opinion on that? And it's not an exam. It's just a way to kind of really broaden the depth of your understanding.
And that can be really, really helpful. So for each of you, what does a week look like in your life at Oxford?
So, Jess, can you start us off?
Oh, so I guess Monday to Friday, it's kind of like standard like quite a lot of lectures and contact hours, including Labs and Toot's.
So in the mornings I generally have lectures from 9:00 till about twelve or one and usually two to three hours of lectures.
And if we're lucky, we get like an hour's break in between.
And then I would head back to college for lunch and just have lunch with my friends, which is quite nice.
It's one of the highlights of my day. And then in the afternoon, I would usually go and work in the library.
I might have maybe one hour of a two or if it's laughs, then it'll be three hours from two till five.
And then in the evening, I usually have some kind of activity on.
So it might be badminton or I play an orchestra or table tennis training or just chatting with my friends.
And then on the weekends,
I would usually have like maybe football or table tennis or just like just anybody working in between the times when I'm doing other things.
Austin, how about you? Okay, so like my kind of standard week from Standard Day, from Monday to Friday,
I suppose kind of English students will have lectures, usually countries in the morning or around midday.
So you kind of get to decide what you're going to get to then unanswered.
You get to the 9am lecture or the tenant and lecture depending on how tired you are.
Then once you've done you like your lectures are being respectful to you.
I went back to college, have lunch with my friends, but she's usually also really, really nice. I think I did a lot of people really enjoy that.
And then in the afternoons, maybe two days of the week, I'll have a shoot.
And then I might have like one or two classes, depending what day it is.
The rest of the time usually fills up with kind of being at the library during
research and reading or writing an essay and putting that together in the evenings.
I'm kind of I try to do some extra curricular stuff, so I'm not kind of stuck in a book the whole time.
So I try to do a lot of music or kind of learning to cook really badly at the moment on the weekends.
It kind of depends. If I'm working on weekends, sometimes you'll have a really lovely free weekend.
And so you get to kind of rest and see friends.
One of the realities of Oxford is, you know, you're often spending, at least during the day, on the weekend doing some work.
But I'm kind of okay with that. I really enjoy it.
And that's just reading other things kind of books is really nice because everything's really, really close.
So you can manage to fit in lots of small activities if you want to.
So the days are quite variable, but, you know, a lot of reading and then I shoot two or three times a week.
Nice. And Frances, how about you? Yeah. My dad is just like a very typical of each other because no two days are really the same.
In the wake of a modern languages student in terms of weekly organised actions of the Spanish.
I have one 90 minute lecture tutorial every week.
And in my first, that was on a Friday afternoon. And on top of that, there are three language classes for Spanish a week.
And one grammar. One oral. And then one that is either dedicated to oral or translation, depending on what we kids.
And then there are also three lectures during the week that are to do with the text or the literature that we're studying.
That particular 10 in terms of version, we have eight Russian classes every week.
And and within these eight courses, we have three weekly tests.
So we have a vocabulary test on the at the. Every Friday we get a rather long list of new words to end the next week.
That sort of ranges anywhere between about 60 and 200. And then on Wednesday, we get tested on some of those Thursday.
And we do a dictation, which is an lushes test, our listening skills and also an ability to recognise new words in spoken Russian.
And then on Friday, we do a unit test, which is kind of an assessment of all of the work we've been doing that particular week.
My and unfortunately means that I have to have lunch out quite a lot.
I very rarely make that college for lunch, which is a shame.
But and it does mean I can have I spend a lot more my lunch break with the people from other colleges who are also doing beginners Russian,
which is very good because we go abroad together in the second. Yes, it's good to get to know them.
And in the evenings, I also do a mixture of casual socialising with just my friends.
All we do extracurricular activity. So I've been to a few events organised by societies that interest me.
I can the International Relations Sites Society or this is going to make me very unpopular.
But I have done a few things with the liberal Democrats. And in my first year and weekends, Dubarry, depending on the amount of work,
I often quite like to just escape Oxfordshire on the weekend and I quite like to go home.
And a lot of my family still most of my family have been living there whole in a structure.
So I often really like to go back there for the weekend. It's relatively cheap to book tickets there.
And I think it's a really nice opportunity to just get away from the pressure cooker for a second and read and see my family again.
Yeah, lovely. So for me, chemistry is a very contact. I always have a degree and you'll find that most universities because the lab requirements.
So I have this year I had 10 lectures a week.
So nine to 11 every day. And I then had labs.
Eleven till five. Two days a week. And I had a maths class every Wednesday.
And then I would have probably one to two tutorials outside of that.
There was a couple of weeks where I had like forty two hours a week and they were a bit insane.
But yeah. So I have a very, very structured day and I get off at the same time every day and I'm not somebody who's super productive in the evenings.
So I generally make it a rule that unless I have a very impending deadline, I don't want past dinner.
And like the others, I tends to socialise with my friends in the evening.
I also do quite a lot of access things. I volunteer. So I did.
I went to a primary school to help young children learn how to read every Tuesday last year.
I'm involved in some music things and just Jamele, I go to some events put on by my scholarship.
So, yeah, it's just generally it's quite a balance. But and then of course I do.
Sometimes I have my fun. We go out, sometimes our group and go and have a laugh at the weekend in a club or in a bar and.
Yeah. I found that having a work life balance was significantly easier than I thought it would be.
I found I had a lot more time to socialise that I maybe thought before before I got to Oxford.
So, Austin, can I just ask, as an international student, how did you find settling into to Queens, on to Oxford in general?
I mean, it's a lot of fun and it's a really exciting time being indigenous.
You should be in Oxford. I suppose when I first moved, especially for like the first three or four months,
it was really difficult being far away from my family because, like, the time difference is nine or 10 hours,
which means kind of I'm either I'm either really, really tired of the money for my family or my family's really,
really tired and one when they're talking to me. I mean, you know, little things that kind of annoy you every night.
The one really lovely thing is that this is now like something that will really be a lot easier.
Another, you know, the whole world has had to adjust to things like Zoome or kind of like using face time, like reputably because of Koban.
So I'm really looking forward to being able to use that to keep in touch with my friends back home.
Well, let's jump back in the UK, I think, really, really broadly. I found a really exciting kind of.
Learning and living in a new country and kind of getting to know new culture.
Because I mean, like the stereotype for me as somebody from Australia and Altiero in New Zealand is like it was people are really,
really cold or not emotionally available. It's really lovely lending, but that's fake.
Once you take people from age. Yeah.
It's so much fun. Oh, God. I'm so glad. And then just to close.
I'd just like to ask each of you, what's your favourite thing about college and why?
So, Jess, can you start as a. Oh, I think.
Well, everyone always says this, but the people that you meet. So this is gonna be true.
Really, no matter which college you go to.
But the nice thing about having a collegiate system is that you get to meet people studying all kinds of different subjects.
So, like amongst my friends, there are loads of people who do like humanities as well as STEM and arts.
It's a real mix and everyone's so lovely. Oh, that's really nice.
Austin, what about you? You know, I suppose this is pretty similar to what just was saying, but like, you know,
meeting and meeting new people and living near new people who are kind of fascinated and passionate about what
they're studying and kind of being able to chat to them about what interests them and their ideas is kind of,
you know, one of the things I find most enjoyable about being an expert. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
I don't think many people often mention that, but yeah.
Being around people who are so intensely passionate about things that are so different from perhaps
what you're passionate about and it is such a learning opportunity that I think is quite underrated.
And Francis, what about you? Yeah, I would echo what both Justin Usted said, but I think another thing that I really like it,
it's a slightly strange one, is the location of the college.
It's just for me particularly, it's so refreshing because normally when I want to sort of go shopping, I'll go out and socialise.
I have to get a train, a long train in Central. And then if I'm in London or a long trinian's home when I'm up in Yorkshire.
So it's really nice to me to just be in the centre of the city and just have about a five minute walk to almost everything.
It's really nice, refreshing change.
And I think it's a great it's a great part of it's a great part of being a queens that I think a lot of people maybe take for granted.
But I think you need spelling out. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Fantastic.
Well, thank you guys so, so much. That was super interesting. And I'm sure everybody who lesson learnt lot.
Absolutely loads. You guys have been fantastic guests and I'll speak to you all soon.
Thank you so much to Jass Francis and Austin for that insightful conversation.
And a massive thank you to all of you who listened. There are loads more access resources on the Queen's College website.
A w w w dot queens dot org. Dot ac dot UK.
Forward slash access dash outreach. And you can find out more about the college in general through its Web site,
Twitter and Instagram, including on the Access Twitter at Queens Outreach.