Two days ago, I sat my last prelim exam and finished my first year of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. Right now is the most competent I will ever be at all 3 simultaneously, as I will not continue studying Politics in my second and third years. But with the academic year seeming like quite literally yesterday, the wounds of exam week1 and three packed terms are still fresh – this all means that while the technical points I’ve made about the course are likely to be accurate, an emotional reflection of the time will probably mellow out with some time. Maybe I’ll revisit this post in the future.

I’ve had ideas to write something along these lines for a while; but it was only once I saw that my friend had published his own version, that I found the serious motivation to set up this website and finally write this. That’s something I’ve really appreciated about PPE: the inspirational coursemates.

Ultimately, this post is not a PPE essay, so I won’t formulaically weigh up positives and negatives to then shit out a dishonest ‘conclusion’ for the sake of arguing. Instead, I’ll first run through the course structure, recount my reasons and expectations when applying, reality check myself with a subject-by-subject review, and finally reflect on the non-coursework Oxford experience. Feel free to skip ahead to the Reality of PPE for the start of my review.

Course Structure

At Oxford, the academic year is split into three eight-week terms: Michaelmas (Oct-Dec), Hilary (Jan-Mar), and Trinity (Apr-Jun). PPE, like other Oxford undergraduate degrees, is a three-year course. The first year is called ‘Prelims’, where you study all three subjects. Most PPEists drop one of the three to focus on their other two subjects in their second and third years (called ‘FHS’, standing for ‘Final Honour School’).

Oxford and Cambridge are quite different to other universities in that administration is federated: ‘Oxford University’ is made up of 30-odd colleges. Each student, whether under- or post-graduate, is a member of a college first and foremost; accommodation, meals, and teaching vary depending on your college. While we do get lectures organised by the faculty/department, teaching is done primarily through the tutorial system, where a tutor (at least a PhD student, quite often post-docs or members of faculty) from your college meets you and one or two other students every week or so to discuss homework and go over content. The direct upshot of such a system is that your enjoyment and understanding of a subject are very closely tied to the specific tutors at your college.

Expectations / Reasons for Applying

There’s no two ways about this: International fees are incredibly expensive. With limited scholarships available for Australian undergraduates, the cost this year came to £36,000 (rising to £40,000+ next year!) for tuition alone. So there must have been many reasons which made me apply despite the substantial cost.

Specialisation

Apart from Australian universities, I only applied to Oxford to read PPE. People would ask me “why did you not apply to the US?”. At the time, my answer was simple: I really wanted to do philosophy while maintaining employment flexibility through economics, and found politics very interesting. PPE was the perfect degree! Plus, I found liberal arts very unappealing, having to do a variety of courses seemed to come at the expense of specialisation and rigour (slightly ironic coming from a PPEist, I know). I saw university as a time to dedicate oneself to a particular subject you loved and get really good at it; the academic attitude of Oxford aligned well with this vision.

I realised I wanted to do Philosophy as soon as I realised it was an actual subject and not just grifters bullshitting about ‘the meaning of life’ – it helped put names to the problems I had been wondering by myself (and getting stuck on and ultimately forgetting) for years, and reading the ingenious solutions put forward by genuinely smart people in history was equal parts satisfying and addicting. Furthermore, disappointing performances in the Australian Physics Olympiads left my motivation and mental health in poor shape; the humanities and essay writing just felt more interesting at the time. Before arriving at Oxford, I imagined I would like Economics the least – it seemed less technical and quantitatively unsophisticated compared to the sciences I was used to. I expected Politics to consist of political analysis of contemporary issues and debates, which I found particularly apt considering the backdrop of the ongoing War in Ukraine as well as 2024 being an election year. I expected Philosophy to be a sort of general overview of the evolution of human thought, going into a few interesting problems here and there, which was how I tended to read philosophy in my spare time anyway.

Finally, I had expected strong interlinking aspects of coursework between all three, as I saw PPE as occupying a very powerful intersection of three salient disciplines. In a world that rewards excellence and specialisation, being a generalist may not be the disadvantage as it prima facie seems. The probability of success as a generalist: there being few people better than you at all your skills simultaneously1, is significantly higher than the analogous probability for a specialist: there being few people better than you at your specialisation. Of course, being Pareto-specialised is only as useful as there actually existing jobs that harness your particular combination of skills. But all three parts of PPE individually offer soft skills and knowledge that are broadly applicable, so in this regard, studying a combination of all three – ‘specialising in being a generalist’ – is very powerful.

The People

My high school was one of the best in the country, and a huge proportion of each graduating class would be gunning for either medicine, law, or a combination of actuarial/computer science/commerce, mostly motivated by prestige, money, or a lack of other passions to follow. Apart from my group of friends and a handful of others, it felt like the majority of students simply weren’t curious nor had academic interests, which felt incredibly stifling. Seeing Oxford’s admission process put a particular emphasis on subject-related passion/skill/supercurricular involvement was a truly exciting prospect. In contrast, American universities like Harvard gave me the vibe of my high school, filled with career-oriented gunners whose desire for prestige outstripped a passion for knowledge. This, combined with my distaste for liberal arts, meant that I was not interested in going to an American university, despite what would have been much more affordable financial aid.

Tutorials

Finally, I’ve always learnt much better in small classes. Throughout thirteen years of schooling, I struggled with focus and engagement in class even on my best days. I wasn’t interested in listening to other students ask questions that I had already figured out, but also didn’t want to ask questions of my own or contribute to discussions out of shyness. However, then I did Science and History Extension at my school, which had four and three students, respectively. I greatly enjoyed both; it was much more engaging – for once, I enjoyed discussions with my classmates and teachers. It was also easier to direct learning in interesting directions in small classes; combined with the fact that both were ‘extension’ courses, I enjoyed much more intellectual flexibility and found the sense of learning something simply for the sake of interestingness delightful. So to hear that the teaching at such an esteemed university was conducted in such a way sounded perfect.

Reality

In retrospect, my expectations of course specialisation were too naïve, considering this was just first-year content. Prelim content was, sensibly, more focussed on getting students from a wide variety of backgrounds (many of whom, like me, had not formally studied any of the three in high school) to a satisfactory degree of procedural competence and disciplinary understanding. Admittedly I do prefer it this way though; I feel like I have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of all three subjects and can explain to the layperson why studying politics does not make me a politician, or why, despite studying economics, I can’t solve inflation or interest rates2. Regardless, I feel well-prepared to learn harder content in FHS, and more importantly, confident in my ability to independently learn more content on all three if I ever wanted to.

On the whole, I’ve found the teaching to be a bit disappointing, if only because my expectations were so high. We did not have many tutorials one-to-two or one-to-one tutorials in true Oxford style; many had three or four students, and college ‘classes’ frequently had eight students or more. I have always been a pretty slow thinker, which meant my tutorial partners would often answer before me. This led me to either rush my thinking and blurt out superficial answers (these would come directly from the readings, with minimal synthesis required – normally I do not see the point in answering these), or just stay silent for big chunks of larger tutorials as I had to juggle between pushing on with my train of thought and keeping up with the conversation. I would almost inevitably fail the former as I get distracted by my tute partner and tutor’s voice, at which point I also would have zoned out and missed the beginning of the conversation. Some of my tute partners and tutors – especially my Theory of Politics tutor – would like to use both big words and talk at a fairly rapid pace, which, combined with my relative incompetence at the subject brewed a perfect storm of incomprehensibility. For some of my revision classes in Trinity, I was poorly prepared as I had been revising another subject / doing something else (read: rowing), which meant I could not follow what was going on. This was entirely my fault of course, and the notes I took down made sense when I revisited them when I started my revision of that subject, but the sense of general confusion and having to sit through a class rather than participate in it which wasn’t great. Finally, some of my tutors were either just lazy/apathetic/disorganised/bad at teaching – more on this in my subject breakdowns – which was disheartening.

One area in which my expectations were not only not disappointed, but exceeded, was in the people I would meet and the conversations I would have. A common phrase in PPE is that we “do it for the people, not the degree”, which I initially found ridiculous but have come to accept over the year. I am extremely grateful to have met my group of friends, mostly the other PPEists at Merton, who, despite their different opinions, are all extremely intelligent and fun to talk to. From the discussions after lectures and tutorials, or in the library, to random conversations in the kitchen and Hall, being able to talk to my friends was what got me out of bed on many days. One indicator of a good conversation for me is that I walk away from it having changed the way I think about something, or having learned something new; I can easily say that I have had the privilege of enjoying many of these mind-blowing conversations, almost every single day at Oxford. Plus, so many of my friends are incredibly driven and good at all sorts of random things, and that inspires me to actually get through my infinite bucket lists of learning new things. It’s just an amazing environment.

Subject-by-subject

Philosophy

Philosophy was a strange triplet of Moral Philosophy (Michaelmas), General Philosophy (Hilary), and Logic (Michaelmas).

Moral focussed on Mill’s Utilitarianism, with a chunk of the course being a textual analysis and the other using it as a point of comparison with other moral systems. I was not particularly interested in Millian exegeses, even though the secondary reading by Roger Crisp was very good. We only had 4 tutorials, all in Michaelmas, and our tutor could not make one of them, but of the ones they did, they were 30 minute one-to-one sessions which were hugely enjoyable and were some of the best I got all year. We also got 30 minute one-to-one tutorials with a moral philosophy PhD student to discuss general writing style and some more content which I found very rewarding as well. We also had hour long classes which got a bit side tracked but our tutor was very knowledgeable so they were fun overall.

  • I had not expected to enjoy moral as much as I did – I would say that as of writing this, I am quite strongly a utilitarian. I have finally understood first-hand the meaning of ‘intellectual influences’ as biographers say – a term spent studying and a year discussing it, with a group of friends that already had a utilitarian lean has left me finding that it simply makes sense.
  • That said, I struggled with the reading each week, in part because I did not really have an effective system in place in Michaelmas to attack the Oxford workload, but also because I did not read Utilitarianism over the vac before term started. As I mention below, I also did not read the harder, later parts of The Logic Manual and so was doubly (triply) screwed in the last 4 weeks of term when we had tutorials in Logic, Moral, and Micro. To the Freshers reading this, read Utilitarianism and The Logic Manual before coming
  • While our tutor was disorganised at times (famously returning our mock exams one term late) I think their understanding of the material made up for it.
  • All considered, the course was not difficult. The literature mainly presents a couple of classic arguments (e.g. the collapse objection against rule utilitarianism) and stock examples (e.g. choosing between the lives of Hadyn and an oyster to motivate higher and lower pleasures) that you can rely on for good marks in essays, though there remained scope for individual reinterpretation. One area I found the literature helpful was in unpicking the moral philosophical jargon (e.g. permissible vs obligatory), and setting out conceptual distinctions (e.g. multi-level act utilitarianism vs rule utilitarianism). A sense of understanding greatly contributes to my enjoyment of a subject and I definitely got that in moral.

GenPhil was closest to what I originally expected philosophy to be like; as such, I had expected it to be my favourite paper. The lectures focussed on 8 ideas rather than thinkers, going from highlight to highlight such as ‘Knowledge’ to ‘Free Will’. We only had 4 tutorials, all in Hilary, but unlike moral, were fortnightly which meant I was able to read the material more thoroughly and prepare better work. However, our tutorials were only an hour long and had two students. We were expected to hand in our essays half a week / a week in advance, so I thought it was thus reasonable to correspondingly expect that the tutor would actually read it. For reasons epistemically inaccessible to my puny student self, they would open our essays for the first time during the tutorial and quickly read it on the spot.

I got off to a rocky start in my first essay on Free Will, as I got overexcited and wrote an essay that was ‘too original’ and ‘did not show understanding of the literature’3.

  • It felt like my tutor just carried some sort of grudge against me for the rest of the term; they would nitpick my essays, such as spending 10 minutes yapping about my comment in my God and Evil essay that ‘non-epistemic reasons for religious belief are outside the purview of philosophy’, followed by another 5 minutes getting pissed at my word choice of ‘overwhelming’ rather than ‘outweighing’ evidence in making epistemic judgments. I will assume in good faith that as professional they did not beef with a student. Regardless of their intention, I did at least (re)learn the importance of precise language4.
  • During that tutorial, I did not understand their point about evidence, and so argued back that it could be reasonable to hold an opinion despite there being outweighing evidence because the evidence was not overwhelming. I realised after the tutorial that I was mistaken: any inclusion of ‘faith’ would either weigh in the opposite direction, which makes the position no longer outweighed, or is no longer epistemic. However, at the time I really did not follow, and rather than really bothering to explain, they commented “Michael there is no need to be so defensive, sometimes you are wrong and that is okay”. Like above, I shall proceed to assume with good faith that they were professional; that comment, albeit slightly patronising, was probably with good intent and evidence of their unique pedagogy. Likewise, regardless of their intention, I did learn a more practical lesson: to be less ‘argumentative’ in my tutorial responses (at least with this tutor) – though I thought that was what tutorials were for? – and to remember to pad my words.
  • A common theme with this tutor was that they would tend to get derailed on random tangents. To their credit, those tangents were often philosophically interesting and I did enjoy them, but were not the best use of our time, given our hour-long tutes that had to be split between two essays (including tutor reading time). Our tutor would also refuse to go over time by a single minute to answer questions5. I realised too late that to get the most out of GenPhil I would have to take more initiative in the tutorial and cut off unfruitful tangents, and more actively make use of the tutor to answer questions, etc.
  • Relatedly, our tutor was generally competent at the material and when asked, would explain the difficult concepts in the readings well and efficiently. As the reading and wrapping my head around concepts tended to take the most time, this left me wishing that we had classes / tutorials with the tutor to assist with the readings, after which I think writing the essays would be easy. That would have been a better use of time, though I suppose ‘developing dense-academic-writing-deciphering skills’ is handy.
  • Overall, I would say GenPhil was not difficult to do well in, as you could just choose one topic to revise for in the Prelim. For most of us this was God and Evil, as there was not much scope for difficult questions: competently running through both the Logical and Evidential Arguments with considerations of counterarguments and responses to those is sufficient for a good mark6.

Logic was taught by the same tutor as GenPhil, in Michaelmas. I did not really know what to expect, as I was entirely unfamiliar with it.

  • Thankfully I read the first couple of chapters of The Logic Manual in the vac, so was relatively alright for the first few weeks of Michaelmas at least.
  • Logic was, on the whole, very intuitive and fun. Translating between natural English and logical formalisations was straightforward. However, one part of logic that I struggled with was Natural Deduction (ND). In retrospect, that was because I hardly got any time to properly learn it by reading the textbook (ontop of moral and micro work), and so was completely lost as to how to approach ND proofs. Three weeks before Prelims, I decided to finish the entire hundred or so questions in the ‘ND Pack’ which helped me get the hang of it. However, even when I had difficulty solving ND problems, the intuition behind the rules remained understandable (e.g. for E-elim, not having an instantiation of the variable with an undischarged constant, as the ‘existence’ of a variable can only prove statements that with an arbitrary constant.)
  • I think formal study of logic, especially in conjunction with analytic philosophy in general, has left me more sensitive to logical words (‘only if’ is a favourite) and the structure of syllogisms (the premisses and conclusion of the argument) when reading or writing.
  • In past years, logic was always seen as a free mark booster in Prelims because it was the only non-essay part of Philosophy, and thus possible to get objectively high marks in. As a result, Logic was capped at 80 (where getting 25/25 marks meant you got an 80; arguably much more doable than getting an 80 in an essay). As the Philosophy prelim paper required you to answer 4 questions with at least 1 in each section, the most common approach was to do 2 logic questions. Unfortunately, this year the logic questions were very difficult, involving question styles hitherto unseen as well as obscure definitions, and so I got a bit cooked. Lesson learned: counter-induction is real7, and because logic were free marks in past years does not mean it would be free marks next year.

Overall, Philosophy has not disappointed. I love it more than ever, and am excited to see what FHS has in store for me!

Politics

Politics was split between Practice of Politics (Hilary) and Theory of Politics (Trinity). Technically there was also QStep (Hilary/Trinity Vac).

Pracpol was political science, where students read a shit ton of empirical papers answering social science problems (mainly the famous papers on the topic), and write secondary essays on the basis of those. We got 16 Practice of Politics lectures on various topics, of which we did 8 in tutorials. At Merton, our eight were evenly split between comparative government (empirically comparing governments/states … woah) and political sociology (the more fun part: explaining observed political behaviour).

  • Our tutor was very knowledgeable about the subject and seeing him thread together the conclusions of our readings to explain the topic to us was satisfying.
  • While some topics were interesting (Social Movements, Party Systems, and Voting Behaviour), most were disappointing or felt dishonest, such as State Formation/Strength8 or Consensus and Majoritarian9.
  • The primary reading, Principles of Comparative Politics (PCP), by Clark and Golder, was fun to read because it intuitively explained causal links between theories (linking to why I enjoyed voting behaviour and party systems). These explanations were frequently game-theoretic, with (boundedly) rational individual actors and parties.
  • I initially struggled with the volume of readings, with most weeks averaging over 200 pages. Eventually I got more efficient: PCP was readable, and for denser papers, figuring out the conclusion that the author drew was sufficient, with no real need to read through their intuitive argumentation (though I still did that because it felt unsatisfying to just remember facts and not ‘why’).
  • Come exam time, because the Politics exam was another 4 essays needing at least 1 in each, I opted to do 3 Pracpol, preparing the 3 I found interesting above and cons/maj (because some questions do not come up each year, or one of the topics might have a difficult question: for example, I found this year’s cons/maj question quite restrictive so did not do it). The difficulty with Pracpol, more so than Theory, is the stronger focus on papers because this subject is so empirical. So my revision involved reciting lists of papers, their conclusions, and half-heartedly their dates before all the numbers mixed together in my head. The department also has a policy where you cannot reuse evidence or arguments across essays, which made related topics like Party Systems and Voting Behaviour more difficult to prepare for, as I had to remember separate papers for both. Overall, this was not too difficult though, I had only started revision at 7pm the night before while battling the beginning of my illness, and found it surprisingly easy to remember the arguments because the readings and my term-time essays came back to me.
  • Overall Pracpol was not terrible. It showed me that political science was generally fake10, but has also equipped me with sufficient vocabulary and grasp of political systems to mansplain prove why Oxford’s Politics Department is ranked number 1 in the world, the next time someone ever decides to ask me a super theoretical yet empirical politics question.

Theory was, as the name suggests, political philosophy. Also 16 lectures, they took a ‘history of political thought’ approach, with influential thinkers like Locke, Rousseau or Marx getting two lectures each. However, they also covered broader topics such as ‘free speech’ or ‘liberty’ near the end. Our Theory tutor was a Mill specialist, so our topics ended up centred on On Liberty: the text itself, free speech, state paternalism, and democracy. While I’m not sure how other universities approach first-year politics, at Oxford, the ‘get the students up to speed’ paradigm rang true for politics as well.

  • None of my essays managed to get above 6111, even on the weeks like State Paternalism where I made fairly extensive progress on the readings and thought I wrote a decent essay (to be fair, while I thought the structure of my argument was genius, it was quite confusing). To be fair, Theory was one of the few subjects where we actually got marked work; all the other essay subjects only got tutor comments (verbally in the case of moral and GenPhil). This helped me realise that Prelim (or PPE essays in general?) essays really just care about clarity and structure rather than much original thought12; as long as you dial in the ‘wanted’ structure, you can much more easily access high marks.
  • Compared to the draconian citation laws of Pracpol, I felt that Theory was easier to prepare for, as the focus seemed to be on understanding lines of argument, rather than knowing conclusions of certain papers.
  • Overall Theory was alright. There were a lot of theoretical arguments, which I was initially terrible at, but slowly got the hang of through the term; one approach I found helpful was to split justifications for a certain principle into theoretical and empirical reasons – intrinsic or practical reasons for adoption. Of all the courses, I think Theory helped me tighten up (or at least diagnose problems in) my essay writing skills the most.

While there technically was scope to bring in contemporary commentary in both all three Politics subjects, in neither of them was it the main aim. I do think that I enjoyed this approach much more than my imagined political commentary nightmare. and despite primarily learning that Politics is a fake subject, have also developed a good feel of how this discipline works.

QStep was a silly quantitative methods course for politics students. We had 8 lectures as well as fortnightly ‘labs’ in Hilary that went over very basic statistics and ‘programming’ in R; I went to one of each. However, those without prior programming or statistics experience might have sat through it and found it enjoyable/useful.

  • The ‘assessment’ is not assessed; it doesn’t factor into your grade. It is a take home 2000 word project to be done over the Hilary/Trinity vac; they give you a list of questions and relevant datasets. I did the consensus majoritarian one, and bashed out the programming and report writing (basically rejigging my tutorial essay) starting in 4 hours the day it was ‘due’.
  • I put ‘due’ in quotation marks because half my cohort did not submit it, probably will not ever submit it, and will be fine. I decided at the last minute to do it because staying up high-school-style was a little nostalgic and also because it really wouldn’t cost me much to do it, for ease of mind.
  • To Freshers reading this, QStep might be more important if you are considering taking second year quantitative politics modules (Comparative Government and IR, I think?). However, you will also have to take QStep-2 for that anyway (which I’ve been told is almost as unserious as prelim QStep) so maybe QStep still doesn’t matter.

Economics

The most STEM-like of the three, the course structure of economics was also the most straightforward, delivered as a standard course of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, with ‘Probability and Stats’ (a preparation for those going on to take quantitative papers) as dessert. All three parts, though especially Micro, were more maths-heavy than expected, and the fusion of mathematical machinery with intuitive interpretation was reminiscent of Physics which I found greatly enjoyable.

Micro lectures were all in Michaelmas, I forgor how many we had (2 a week?). Though I had never studied economics (with the exception of a single term in Year 11 spent playing Tetris in class) before, it was all comprehensible. Micro was the most maths-intensive econ course, jumping straight into formulae, and even then did not progress much beyond first derivatives in optimisation problems.

  • My tutor for micro was amazing. They knew economics inside out, and was constantly able to not only answer my out-of-syllabus questions, but in a manner that I felt like I understood it.
  • Partly to make myself feel better, but this was surely a harder intro econ course than at other universities. We covered all the usual consumer theory stuff of optimising purchases for utility, as well as monopoly and oligopoly supply and demand dynamics, elementary game theory, and public policy.
  • In retrospect, I would have attended more lectures, as examiners have to write from lecture content. Furthermore, our lecturers were pretty good and might have saved me some time bashing my brains out when reading Varian / Perloff.
  • I think the difficulty with Micro is the huge extent of content that is in the course. Combined with the fact that the examiners have recently decided to up the difficulty of micro exams, that meant that the question in Prelims asked pretty obscure terms (‘reservation price’, who is he?) compared to the bog-standard given Cobb-Douglas utility and budget, work out demands, or calculating equilibria and DWL of monopolies.

Macro lectures were all in Hilary, and I also forgor how many we had (quite a few, like Micro).

  • Our first tutor for Macro was not very good. They would go very slowly through easy problems on the problem sheets, while also slowly and not really explaining the more difficult ones. They did unfortunately fall ill at the beginning of Trinity, which meant that we got a replacement tutor who was very good, like my Micro tutor, and was able to answer my questions nicely as well as teach the content.
  • Like Micro, I wished I attended more lectures as that would have explained a lot of the trickier parts of problem sheets, as well as some of the more pedantic preferences of lecturers13. As economics exams are written on the basis of lecture content, attending is basically a cheat code.
  • Intuitive interpretation of answers featured more heavily in macro than micro. While I thought I would be good at that, I tended to write either too much or too little, or about the wrong explanations (a problem that I suspect would have been helped if I attended more lectures). I never quite figured out what made a great answer in Macro.
  • As for content, we covered countries’ productivity and output (long run), interest rates and inflation (short run), and briefly exchange rates and trade, which is what the layperson (i.e. me before PPE) thought economics was all about. Learning Macro, therefore, has helped me grasp this much better and understand economic dialogue and analysis on the news.
  • Macro was not very mathematical; while we played with a few models such as Solow / Romer / AS/AD, the experimentation with these models involved much easier maths than micro.
  • That said, I will not be taking Macro for FHS, even though I might do a Masters in Economics. My main reasons for this decision are: 1) Apparently Macro finals involve 3 essays and even more interpretation in answers, 2) What I’ve learned in Prelims seems sufficient to grasp the gist of economic reporting; FHS Macro builds on Prelim models like AS/AD rather than introducing new ones, and 3) It seems focussing on Quantitative modules like microanalysis/QE/econometrics are what are required; the non-mathy bits of macro can probably be learned later anyway.

Prob and Stats was quite fun. It was taught through a set of pre-recorded lectures, though there were problem sheets and demonstration lectures for those too. I would highly recommend doing (or at least skimming) the problem sheets, the questions on there were nice and help you get a feel for the questions. We also had a couple of tutorials in college, with our Micro tutor.

  • The first part of Prob and Stats focussed on manipulating expectation, variance, and probability identities14. This was straightforward, the intuition should come after doing a couple of problems.
  • Applying the mathematics to samples naturally led to confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. This topic was a bit pedantic in terms of precision in language, which was reasonable. I did not bother learning the recommended ‘procedure’ for hypothesis testing, did my own thing, worked out a p-value, and got a 32 in my collection. The procedure was not difficult in any way, so that’s free marks too.
  • Time series felt the least cohesive of the topics, and was more like a random bundle of fun facts. Telling us the names of different AR(1) processes, correlograms, and going back to algebra mashing expectations, variances, and autocorrelations. A bit challenging to remember all the names since it was the first bit of the course that was properly new for me, but not too bad all things considered.
  • Causal inference was the final topic and also new to me. I found the calculation of Average Treatment Effects to be super cool, and while I never really got around to seriously revising it for Prelims, the power of causal inference made me want to keep studying prob and stats by taking quantitative economics next year.

A year at Oxford

The ‘Oxford experience’ is hardly just the academics. While I certainly wasn’t left disappointed by the coursework, what really made my year were the people and clubs; I think both have helped me grow immensely, and left me a very different person to who I was before I came.

While I briefly wrote about the people above, they were more than just the conversations. I witnessed first hand many acts of kindness and friendship, inspiring me to do more of the same. I’ve become more leftist recognised my previously unconscious leftist opinions only through the many long, late-night, insightful, and impassioned conversations that I would never have had, had I not come to Oxford. And through the collective trauma of diabolical deadlines, inhuman amounts of work, and disorganised administration, I’ve found a sense of camaraderie with my friends that I hope will remain for many years to come.

I had browsed through the various clubs at Oxford before coming to get a sense of what people at Oxford were generally into, as well as attending the various stalls at Freshers’ Fair. Most of my time was spent rowing with my college Merton, or attending talks at Philosophy Society, Oxford Speaks, or the Strategic Studies Group (OUSSG). Rowing has been incredible, and warrants a post of its own, which will come soon!. Discipline, perseverance, and camaraderie with my crewmates through 6am water outings and 6pm erg sessions are only some of the qualities I’ve developed over a year of rowing. I’m looking forward to next year as vice captain of the men’s side.

Similarly, roster of speakers I listened to in person (and whose books I got signed) have been genuinely incredible – I just can’t imagine a similar experience at any other university back home. After the first few talks/lectures of being starstruck, I now more easily comprehend that they are just people too, albeit particularly distinguished in their fields. A couple of dud talks later too, I recognise that distinction does not always track competence! Many barely delivered their addresses coherently, let alone properly answering audience questions. Others, however, were excellent – I particularly enjoyed one by Daron Acemoglu about the effects of AI on productivity, and Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee about why those in defence must care about climate change. On the whole I found OUSSG talks to be extremely high quality, and were weekly nuggets of insight that changed the way I thought about certain topics / taught me that certain topics existed – it was like reading a great book or watching a great documentary without having to spend the time browsing, or risk getting a bad one.

Predictions?

Now that I have this blog going, I can properly note down my expectations of FHS so when I finish that, I can come back to compare. While I have not settled on my paper choices, it probably will not change much from the following split of Philosophy and Economics:

  • Ethics
  • Knowledge & Reality
  • Philosophy of Wittgenstein
  • Aesthetics
  • Philosophy of Mind / Practical Ethics / Econometrics (probably the latter)
  • Microeconomics
  • Quantitative Economics
  • Game Theory

I think I am most looking forward to Aesthetics, as that is something that I’m personally really interested in. But I’m wary of what happened to my GenPhil enthusiasm, so will approach it tentatively. I’m also looking forward to Ethics, as it is just genuinely interesting as well, and I think it is the paper that would have the biggest impact on my life. Finally, I’m semi-anxiously looking forward to Game Theory; while it is notoriously difficult, I’ve missed the mathematical problem solving from Olympiads so it’s going to be exciting!

  1. As it turns out, a can of Red Bull every day of the week combined with 5 hours of sleep every night (spent staying up talking, not revising) leads to immune system deficiencies and bronchitis. ↩ ↩2

  2. Or, in the microeconomic lingo, the probability of them Pareto Dominating you. ↩

  3. It would probably be something along the lines of “macroeconomics is a pseudoscience”. ↩

  4. Though if the tutor actually read the essay before the tutorial, they would have recognised that my argument was a reimagined version of Frankfurt’s higher order volitions. Oops! ↩

  5. Definitely ironic given that many of my essays tend to nitpick question vocabulary, but very welcome lesson to be learnt indeed. ↩

  6. This lead to a Nickname among our cohort of ‘our favourite trade unionist’. ↩

  7. This is only going off of past examiners’ reports. There is a non-negligible chance that the markers decide to absolutely cook me in prelims. ↩

  8. Shhh don’t think too hard about how I inductively concluded that. ↩

  9. State formation was fucking atrocious. Theories included ‘roving bandits’ (a novel and frankly deranged) concept where state revenue is more effectively raised collected as a constant tax under a centralised administration, rather than going around to citizens and collecting payment by threatening violence. ‘War builds states’ was another bogus theory in the readings, which argued that the stresses of raising funding for soldiers forced a country to develop a stronger tax (and necessarily, administrative) system, advantages that remain. These theories were hardly founded in anthropology, nor were they advanced as a useful way to think about things (for example, social contract theories, at least maintain a normative component apart from the descriptive). ↩

  10. Cons/Maj was a popular topic because of its straightforwardness, but the content itself was bullshit. Out of 36, mostly advanced democracies, Lijphart pulls the two axes of ‘executive-parties’ and ‘federal-unitary’ out of his ass to determine how ‘consensual’ or ‘majoritarian’ a country is. Firstly, only the first axis is statistically significant in most cases. Secondly, he frequently commits egregious (though entertaining!) acts of data manipulation, such as when he ‘proves’ that consensus democracies are ‘kinder and gentler’, of which a metric is incarceration rates, by deleting the data point of the USA, a very federal (i.e. consensual along the federal/unitary dimension) country, because “incarceration rates in the USA are off the charts”. I get that it might be an outlier, but the numbers don’t lie and it was not erroneous data collection – surely that means it should be included otherwise the results are simply non-representative? If you disagree, or have a counterargument for why such an outlier should be removed, please get in touch! I’d love to hear why. ↩

  11. I was cooked for my Trinity collections after spending the week before in cold and rainy Exmoor for rowing camp, which meant I didn’t get to actually read On Liberty. It never really got better from there. ↩

  12. On the Politics marking rubric, ‘evidence of original thought’ only appears at marks of 85+, and ‘evidence of ability to form independent critical assessment’ at 78+, both ridiculously high marks for essays. That is all to say, you really need to nail the basics rather than think too hard as the returns are truly marginal. ↩

  13. For example, they preferred modelling consumption in terms of both fixed proportions of long run output on top of a difference between interest rates and the discount factor, rather than just the former. ↩

  14. Always a joy to use Bayes’ Theorem and the Law of Iterated Expectation. ↩