“The endless but incredibly satisfying process of being emailed an essay title and reading list (several pages long) and having no clue about the topic and often not understanding the terms in the essay question. There are so few places where you have the opportunity to discuss your week’s work with a leading academic in their field.” The highlight of the academic week is the tutorial – one of the main reasons I applied to Oxford. I am both a physical and human geographer, choosing Biogeography and Finance as my two special subjects. Throughout the three years you study both human and physical core topics, with the ability to select special topics on top of this in your second and third years. "I chose to apply for Geography at Oxford because of the uniqueness of the course and the challenge I knew it would provide.
The course isn't just a series of lectures though, we get classes where we carry out group work, allowing us to try out new skills and engage with other people on our course.” “The geography course is so diverse, ranging from the economy to rocks, as well as delving into geographical controversies that get you thinking about the world around us. Independent research in the field or in archives is also a key element of the dissertation with around 30% of our undergraduates choosing to do their dissertation overseas each year. Second-year students will undertake a week-long overseas residential field course (currently to the Netherlands, Berlin and Tenerife). In the first year, all students take part in a four-day physical geography field trip at the start of term, as well as local skills-related field days. The School of Geography and the Environment emphasises the importance of fieldwork since we believe there is no substitute for teaching subjects first hand. Fieldwork and international opportunities The department also has well-equipped Geolabs for practical physical courses and individual research projects including the Geography Research and Teaching Labs, the Oxford Luminescence Dating Lab and the Oxford Rock Breakdown Lab. There are over 100 print journals on the open shelves of the SSL as well as electronic access to over 600 core journals. The facilities available at Oxford are among the best in the country, notably the Social Sciences Library (SSL), which holds a geography collection of over 28,000 volumes on its open shelves with many more held in closed stack storage. There is considerable emphasis placed on interdisciplinary approaches in the course, with opportunities to explore the cross-fertilisation between geography and other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, economics, earth sciences and biology.
Students are introduced to the full range of geographical topics in the foundational courses, which they can then follow up in more detail in the optional papers. The Oxford Geography degree focuses on the interrelationships between society and the physical and human environment. ">Video of Geography at Oxford University