Access DVD - Studying Classics at Oxford

Transcript (abridged)

(In case you have difficulty playing the video)

It's obviously very stressful - it's very good training if you ever want a job. It's a good process for settling you in - you get to stay in college, you get to do entertaining things. The actual process for itself is self-explanatory - there's quite a lot of assistance given on the website.

The interview process is probably similar to the interviews for most subjects. You sit two interviews mainly, and maybe an interview at an interview for another college if you're being considered elsewhere. It's perfectly pleasant, it's quite like what you grow to used to - quite similar to what a tutorial would be like. The tutors don't try to trick you but they do try and push you to make sure you know what you're talking about and most importantly, that you're interested in what you're walking about. They don't expect a massive knowledge of the subject beforehand but they do expect considerable interest. If you do have that interest it can make the interview quite interesting - scary but quite informative.

All first-year students have two terms of language based teaching. They have things called milk classes - 2 hours of teaching a week - 1 hour in Greek, 1 hour in Latin. They take unfortunately take place at 9 o'clock, so they aren't massively popular. But on top of that, you have not that many lectures. Because classics is an arts degree it's heavily reading and essay writing based - not massively lecture focuses. You have about 3 lectures a week in first year - you can go to more if you're very keen. There is quite a lot of reading to do. I never had any guidelines but there is a certain amount you can't get away without doing. You have to write one essay a week on average. This gradually increases to about 2 essays a week.

It's perfectly doable. It requires you to structure you time. It's more fun if you structure your time. You have to do a considerable amount of reading for each one, then write an essay. You get a lot quicker at writing essays. You have ,aybe 3 hours of tutorials a week. In your first year you would also have prose composition and unseen work which takes about an hour a week. It's quite fun actually - It's more useful than language classes. It's a perfectly bearable quantity of work.

A high proportion of people who come to do Classics at Oxford have already studied Latin and Greek at school, but there is a growing proportion of people who take a course for those who haven't studied one or both of these languages. There's lots of information on the university and the classics faculty websites and you can get in touch with tutors. Then in your first year, instead of two 9am classes you'd have the massively unpopular five 9am classes. After sitting those classes and tutorials, you can engage with the ancient language in the same way as someone who has been learning it for years.

In practice, it's very difficult - you have to be quite committed.

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Many thanks to David Hunt for this interview!

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