English at UCL

Also looking to firm my offer- and I'd appreciate a reply from a current student too!
I thinkthere's one on one tutorials every fortnight, but it would be nice to hear about what people's' experiences of these are and if they continue into the second and third years. The course looks great to be honest overall. You might want to look at the course handbooks available on the website here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/current/undergraduate

Thanks for the link! I've been reading through it a bit and this does answer a few of my questions
I love the sass of the undergraduate handbook: "Claims have been made for the study of literature as a morally uplifting and civilising activity; objections have been made to it as a pointless self-indulgence. You are not required to believe either, and would be well advised to postpone judgment for three years (at least)."

Hey! I'm a second year Eng student at UCL Contact hours are the amount you spend in uni, having face to face time in lectures/seminars/tutorials - for a subject like English, these are usually low, because the course depends on self-motivated study, so this is an important one to look at when you're choosing unis (when I applied, Manchester was just 3 hours a week!). I had 7.5 contact hours per week last year - that's quite high for English, but it means you have a lot of free time!! In the course guide, it says you're advised to do 40 hours of work per week, which is over 30 hours independent study (no-one actually does that much, but it's good to bear in mind!). That doesn't include tutorials, which are half an hour, once a fortnight - and they're one on one. It's a really valuable part of the course - you get to talk to your tutor about your essays in detail, rather than having it marked and just handed back to you.
The course in second and third year varies depending on your modules, but first year is standard for everyone: you have 4 modules, Narrative Texts, Medieval English, Criticism and Intellectual and Cultural Sources. You have one lecture per course per week (each is an hour) and the equivalent of one seminar (also an hour) per course per week as well - in my year, Criticism and ICS were run as 1.5 hour seminars on alternate weeks, but I dont know if this happens every year. Across those courses, you end up studying Middle and Old English (so you'll read some OE poetry, Beowulf, Chaucer and other ME texts) and some of the most important canonical works - you basically start with the Odyssey, and work right up to the present day. This means that you don't get a lot of choice (or in fact any) in your first year modules, but you get an overview of all the modules for 2nd and 3rd year - so when it comes to picking your options, you'll be much better informed.
2nd and 3rd year is much the same - a few of the options are solely seninar-based, so you have no lectures, but most of them are weekly 1hr lectures and fortnightly 2hr seminars, and your tutorials continue. Work-wise, the reading is not too much - after all, you have a lot of free time! The only way your progress is assessed is through essays that you give to your tutor every two weeks - in first year, you only write essays on the Narrative Texts, but in 2nd and 3rd year you do one essay per course per term. Finally, a big thing to bear in mind: this is an exam-heavy course! All of your first year modules are assessed through exams; in 2nd and 3rd year you have a choice to drop an exam and do an 8000 word essat instead - but only one exam per year, so you still have to sit 6 exams across the 2 years. The compulsory courses (Shakespeare, Chaucer and Commentary and Analysis) have to be done as an exam - and those exams are all 6 hours. So if you're not an exam person, it's probably not the place to be!
That was my objective summary - but from a personal perspective, I absolutely LOVE the course here. I like the range, and the fact that all of English literature is open to us; the lecturers are amazing, so intelligent and inspiring, but they're still approachable; the course is demanding but in a good way, and you get to be surrounded by intelligent, book-loving people like yourself! There's also a lot to get involved with at UCL in all that free time - societies (like the English Society!), clubs, sports, volunteering, events and loads more. And London is the best place in the world. ))))
I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you have more questions, and feel free to message me!

Thank you so much! This pretty much answers all my questions 6-hour-long exams seem daunting but I'll probably survive!
I want to prepare myself for it and have a minimum of literary knowledge before starting the course, so are there any books I should read before then?

Actually, the exam wasn't that bad - I have a 3 hour closed book one coming up this week and I find myself wishing I had the extra time!
Definitely, definitely try and get through Paradise Lost - it's really dense so it will probably take you a while (and don't worry if you struggle! Miltonic sentences are notorious for being long and difficult); then I would suggest getting ahead with the ICS texts, like the Bible/Odyssey/Oedipus and so on. I found I had time to read most of the texts as the course went on - if you stay about two weeks ahead of the reading, you'll be fine! So you can use the summer to tackle the ICS list, because they're not all compulsory but they're all good to know! And you could also start with the middle English, just to get used to the language. The other narrative text that people struggle with is Tristram Shandy - 85% of people HATE it, some people love it - but it's very very weird and digressive and gets going about 200 pages in, so that one can take a while. But really just flick through the reading lists and see what grabs you! You can also flick through the history of English Literature or the intro to the Norton anthology and pick up some contextual info for the periods you'll cover, or info on poetic techniques - there's a huge bit in one of them that explains all the metres of poems (which you should learn now, because I still only know iambic pentameter, which is embarrassing and unhelpful).