University of Oxford offer-holders' thread 2015

I've never been to the Cambridge botanical gardens (they don't have a Will & Lyra's bench though) but I do agree that the Sedgwick Museum is a strong rival to the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

I was thinking Fitzwilliam versus Ashmolean.

But yeah, Sedgwick is great. Bit small but interesting stuff. Disappointed by the dino being fake tho.

Are you still at Oxford?

Yeah. You?

It can't have gone too badly =p
Ahh, wir sollen zusammen sprechen!
Hmmm, I picked up Japanese because I was interested in the culture (which I am not really anymore, but it was enjoyable so continued), then Mandarin seemed like a good thing to learn =d and it would also help with the Japanese! (which it does…but it also confuses me at times too >.<) Why did you choose to study French and German? Because those are what are available to us in school?
Ahh, at least you can do some very quickly! And in the exam you get a choice so as long as enough come up that you can do…if you get three questions done that’s pretty good going, I don’t think you’d need 6 for a 1. But then again, they don’t really say how they mark it =d

Well I never was at Oxford so no.

I spoke a bit of German in my interview even though I'm applying for Geology!

I thought you interviewed or something.

Ooh cool! How come?

Thanks, which college was that? What are you studying - straight maths or a compsci/combined course?

The interviewer noticed my German surname and it turned out he studied and lived near where my German side of the family lives and for some reason I thought it'd be a good idea to start talking in German and we had a little 30 second banter in German :3

I guess so, but it felt sooo bad... There were points when everyone was silent because we were all very confused and didn't know what was going on hahaa...
Ja natürlich! Das wäre echt gut!
Ah ok. I don't know much about Japenese culture but I have a friend who's really into it. So are Japanese and Mandarin quite similar then? Yeah, I chose French because I find it quite easy and there wasn't anything else I wanted to do. I actually really enjoy German though and want to spend time in Germany for a bit at some point
Haha, but the problem is enough nice ones coming up... Hmm, they say 4 decent (but not perfect) answers generally get a 1 and I have no idea whether I'd be able to get that in the exam. Do you think you're going to take STEP then?

Japanese and Mandarin are very different.

Well I mean, I have two other unis that I would feel happy going to if Ox doesn't work out, but they are very competitive so I don;t know if there's any point in having them as an insurance if I miss my Ox offer. Alternatively, there are two other offers which are fine, but I'm not really sure I want to go to them that much. So that leaves me a choice between stupid (pick Ox and a v. competitive same offer uni) or safe (pick ox and lower offer uni).

Hi, any lawyers? What are you guys thinking of insuring? I can't decide because literally everything is the same offer.

Does anyone know who I should contact in this situation? Basically, I've realised that there is a module (actually more than one, but one in particular) in Oxford's Physics course that's actually extremely relevant to what I want to do after my undergraduate degree and I wanted to find out if the contents in that module is something I could study as part of my Earth Sciences degree (for instance, if it'd be possible to do that as a fourth year project or if it appears in any of the Earth Sciences modules). Is it okay to email the admissions department about this or would this come across as annoying? I don't want to switch to Physics, but I would really like to know if it's at all possible to cover this module in my degree because it's something I'd really like to study. Alternatively, is there any possibility of studying modules from outside of your course?

I thought the Singaporean government pays tuition even for those students who decide to study abroad?