1

Me and My Family

 

Hello everyone. My name is Declan. I am really excited to be talking to you tonight about my experiences at the University of Oxford. I want to start by thanking you all for being here to listen to what I have to say. You have already made a great first step towards admission at a great university somewhere in the world by putting in the effort early on in the process to hear a wide range of opinions. I wish you all the best luck with whatever university you apply for, but I hope that after this talk you will seriously consider sending in an application for the University of Oxford!

 

Before I go into the detail of my life at the University of Oxford and the application process, I want to spend a few minutes to introduce myself so you all know a little bit about me.

 

My name is Declan Davis, and I am 21-year-old Australian who lives in Beijing, China. I originally grew up inPerth, Western Australia, which is part of Australia that no one ever seems to go to.

 

As you can see from this map, Perth is basically in the middle of nowhere. You are probably all more familiar with cities on the other side of Australia like Sydney or Melbourne. Now, although Perth is basically in the middle of nowhere, it is still a beautiful and thriving part of Australia. This is a picture taken from the river near the city. As you can see Perth is not the biggest city, but it has plenty of open water and green areas that make it an amazing place to grow up.

 

I am the youngest of three children. This is a picture taken of my entire family and me last Christmas. I am the one on the far left. Next to me is my older sister Ester who also went to the University of Oxford. She went to Oxford to do a PHD in cardiovascular medicine and is currently a cardiologist back home in Australia. Next to my sister, in the middle of the picture, is my mother Linda. My mother went to the Universityof Cambridge and used to be a politician before she retired a few years ago. At the back next to my mother is my father Stephen who is also a doctor, and next to him on the far right of the picture is my older brother Henry who is an English Literature teacher at my old high school. As you can see I am lucky tocome from a family of over achievers – my dad and sister are both doctors, my mother was a politician, and my brother is a teacher.

 

My academic background is very broad. I studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics as an undergraduate student at Oxford. This gave me the opportunity to explore a range of subjects. I ended up specialising more into international affairs and mathematics, with half of my final subjects being either explicitly mathematically related or involved with international finance or politics. Recently I have become especially interested in the affect of automation and youth unemployment. At Peking University I have continued to keep my interests and academic pursuits as wide as possible,studying both economics and international relations equally. This has left mewith a slight problem though, as I am still unsure which of the two I want to write my thesis on. This is stressing my parents out!

 

I have spent a year in china so far and I am planning on spending another year here to do two things. The first thing that I want to do is work on my Mandarin. The second is that I want to work on researching HIV in the LGBT community in China. I have started to work with the Beijing LGBT Centre and I want to see if I can progress this work to help the most vulnerable groups in Chinese society obtain access to HIV medication and testing.

 

After this second year in China I am planning on moving back to Australia, but not to Perth. I have just been lucky enough to receive a job offer from Bain and Company, a multinational managementconsulting company, for their Sydney office.

 

2

Oxford and PPE

 

That is enough information about me. Let’s start talking about Oxford. I am going to start by introducing the PPE program, then talking aboutmy life as an undergraduate student in the United Kingdom. After I do that, Iwill run through some of the particulars of the application process, and some of my key tips and ideas.

 

Let’s start with the basics. I am going to assume that you are all unfamiliar with the Oxford system, and with PPE (the abbreviation for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), so I am going to workthrough the whole course methodically.

 

PPE is the best thing that I ever did. It gave me a broad education at one of the best universities in the world, and gave me the opportunity to push myself academically whilst being exposed to world-class professors and students. PPE is a three-year course at the University of Oxford. At the end of the degree you graduate witha Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The degree is probably the most flexible degree that you can take at the university. It is broken up into two main chucks: the first chuck is your first year at university, called Prelims. The second part is the last twoyears of the degree, called Finals. These two names are important to remember because Oxford students will use them all the time to describe where they arein their degree or to talk about particular times in their degrees.

 

As a Prelims PPE student you have to study all three parts of the course that is you will spend an equal amount of timestudying politics, economics, and philosophy. Everyone does the same stuff and you have all your work managedby your college. Speak about colleges, you apply to a college, it becomes the hub of your life, its super cool, picking a college is a super important and fun part of the admissions process.  At the end of your first year, you have exams.

 

During the last two years of your course, you can drop one of the three.  I chose politics and economics. You can pick all of your subjects among around 70 courses. It is possible to meet other people doing PPE who do none of the same subjects as you.

 

The next important thing is the way you get taught at Oxford. Oxford is famous for its tutorial system. Let me explain what that means. An Oxford tutorial is basically you sitting in a room with oneother student who’s also studying your subject, and the professor or the world expert in that topic.

 

The tutorial system really means you can’t hide anywhere. If the conversation moves to you, it becomes every obvious ifyou didn’t do the work. The benefit of the tutorial system is that it makes you do the work. It’s really important because if you want to get the most value outof your degree, you have to do the reading, especially for a subject like politics.

 

Another important part is the workload. As a PPE student, you should be writing two 2000 words essays every single work.That’s a lot of work, but you get used to it very quickly. You also get really good at not skim reading, but reading large numbers of documents for the key details at a quick pace.

 

I think the best way to give you a flavour of PPE is to talk you though an average week of a PPE student. Now, this may sound terrifying, as there is a huge amount of work that you are expected to doeach week. But, don't worry; as you will see from the pictures, there is plenty of time to have fun as well. I am going to give you an example of what the lastweek of my first term at Oxford looked like:

 

Day 1 (Sunday): I always made Sunday a reading day. In that day I would normally do all the reading requiredfor one of my essays. So, a usual Sunday for me at Oxford would be sitting in a library or in my room reading articles about international trade, or working form a textbook to understand the intricacies of microeconomics.

 

Day 2 (Monday): No-one likes Mondays, so I always made Monday one of my huge workdays. On Monday I would normally read until lunch time, and then finish my economics essay that was due for a tutorial on Wednesday. The economics essay had to be submitted by 8amTuesday morning, so I would try to get it done by very late Monday night.

 

Day 3 (Tuesday): Now that the economics essay is done, it is time to start doing my reading for my politics essay. This would easily take up an entire day, so all of my Tuesday would betaken up with reading articles about US presidential politics. Unfortunately,when I was studying US presidential politics Donald Trump didn't exist, so it was less exciting than it would be now. I would try to go to bed on Tuesday night with a plan for my politics essay.

 

Day 4 (Wednesday): I start the day with an economics tutorial. In that tutorial we would discuss the essaythat I had written earlier that week. That tutorial would go for normally about an hour, or an hour and a half depending on how much of an argument/discussion we got into. The moment that tutorial was finished I would run to write mypolitics essay which was due at 5pm on Wednesday. Now, up until Wednesday at 5pm my entire week had been work that is true. But now that I have finished all the work for the week, my two essays are complete and I only have one more tutorial left, I can start to enjoy myself. One thing that you will learn at Oxford is that there is always a fancy dinner to be going to. Here is a picture of me at the end of my first term at Oxford going to the Christmas dinner after that 5pm tutorial. I don't even look that tired!

 

Day 5 (Thursday): The only thing I had to do on Thursday is go to my politics tutorial, which is in the afternoon.I therefore spend the entire morning sleeping in catching up for all those late nights earlier in the week. After my politics tutorial, I decide that I am going to play some croquet with my friends. For those of you who don't know, croquet is one of the favourite sports of Oxford students because it is easy tolearn and you can always find a group of people willing to play. As you can seefrom the picture, I am on the far right; it is common for people to wearoutrageous outfits. Instead of going out on Thursday I take the night off and go to bed early.

 

Day 6 (Friday):  Friday is the last day of term, and is customary at Oxford the end of every term means that there will be an Oxford ball. As you can see, everyone dresses up in amazing outfits and enjoys a night in one of the colleges. For this ball I was fortunate enough to be able to invite three of my friends from Australia who were visiting to attend. Now, Ithink Oxford balls are a good enough reason in of themselves for you to apply to Oxford – I have never had as much fun than at an Oxford ball partying until the sun rises.

 

Day 7 (Saturday): As you can see, PPE is a lot of work, but if you manage your time effectively, something you will learn to do very quickly at Oxford, you can also fit in a lot for other activities. There is time to spend on your hobbies; there is time to travel. As you can see here, my friends and I took a weekend off to.

 

3

More than Academics

 

There is of course more about undergraduate experience. Oxford has a club for everythingthat you can think of. Whether you want to do debating, drink tea, practice anotherlanguage, or practice cases for consulting interviews. It’s very easy to get focusedonly on your degree, but there is so many other things to be doing at the same time.

 

Another huge part of that is the career service. Oxford has a fantastic career center. When I went to Oxford, I just turned 18. I had no idea what I was doing and noidea what I want to do. They were very supportive of someone like me who have no idea. Over the course of my three years at Oxford, they set up all those fantastic opportunities. I got to work for law firms in HK and Singapore. I was invited to a special dinner by McKinsey for people interested in consulting. They have great connections with the city of London and the big financialinstitutions and consultancies.

 

On top of that, there are other extra-curricular things you can do. When I was astudent at Oxford, I launched an LGBT conference, which I had support from theuniversity. They helped me figure out how I should do it, but let me keep ownership of the project.

 

Oxford is hard work, Oxford is a lot of fun, but Oxford is more than a degree andthere is a whole world happening at Oxford.

 

To conclude this section on the nuts andbolts of PPE I want to draw your attention to the alumni of this programme. PPEis widely regarded as the most prestigious undergraduate degree in the UnitedKingdom, if not the world. Looking at the alumni it becomes obvious why – for example, David Cameron, the former Prime Minster of the United Kingdom did PPE. Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister of Australia did PPE. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese politician and Nobel Prize winner did PPE. Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan did PPE. PPE has a reputation around the world as the best degree you could possibility study, as an undergraduate and I couldn't agree more. If you don't want to be a scientist and you want to study a social science, I do not think there is any better option than studying PPE at the University of Oxford. It gives you the skills you need to perform in a variety of professional roles, and gives you the confidence and connections to achieve.