Studying in the Department
As an undergraduate student of Earth Sciences in Oxford, you will very soon feel part of a close-knit and vibrant community. The main components of the course are delivered in lectures and practical classes but, as a small department (our intake over the past 3 years averages about 32 students/year), even our lectures are informal. With small classes, you'll get to know your lecturers and demonstrators by name - and vice versa.
The emphasis on teaching in Oxford is not just about feeding you information, or getting you through exams: its more about training you to think, to solve problems and to apply your understanding to new situations.
There are a number of distinctive features about studying in Oxford that will shape your undergraduate experience. Perhaps the most distinctive feature is the 'tutorial' system. Tutorials are small-group classes (in groups of 2 or 3) that usually take place once a week. You will have work to complete before the tutorial - perhaps an essay, or some directed reading, a practical exercise or a problem set - and in the tutorial you take the answers apart, or explore the context of the problems. Many of the tutorials will be led by the teaching staff, leading experts in their field; other tutorials may be led by younger researchers: graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Either way, the close contact this gives you with people who are actively engaged in research will be a stimulating and challenging experience.
The staff profile is young, and international: half of the faculty have either studied or taught overseas, and one third have taken up their posts in Oxford within the past three years. They include graduates in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Biology, in addition to Earth Sciences/Geology. Our research spans an equally broad range - from the depths of the Earth and the Oceans, through the origins of life, the tectonics of continents, the chemistry of the atmosphere and the circulation of the oceans to the history of the solar system and the formation of the planets.
Our course structure reflects the breadth and depth of the department. The course is continually evolving, reflecting our evolving understanding of the Earth. The first two years of the course give you a sound foundation across the subject. Subsequently, students are able to start to specialise. In the third year, after completing an independent field mapping project (in a carefully researched place of your choice), you will be able to start to specialise with a choice of courses. You can also follow a topic of particular interest to much greater depth, in the independent essay paper (again, researching a topic of your choice). The fourth year is, for most of our students, the culmination of the course. Taught classes at this level mostly take the form of directed seminar classes: led with student presentations, based on the current work in the field. But the main aspect of the fourth year is the research project: a piece of original work, often at the forefront of the subject, which is spread over two terms (usually October to March/April). For many students, this is the highlight of the course - and many of these projects will eventually be written up and published as research papers.