Incoming E&M undergrad at Oxford, need some advice!

Hey! I've been searching around for past exam question papers, sample tutorial questions and textbooks for first years but I can't find anything. I haven't received my college email yet so I can't access OXAM or Canvas either. Can anyone help me out on how I could prepare academically, before college starts, as I've heard the workload can get pretty intense. Thank you!

Reply 1

thegeek888

Original post

by Abhipsa

https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate-admissions/economics-and-management-reading-list

The principal books used in the first year are J M Perloff, Microeconomics (which requires some knowledge of calculus), R Frank and E Cartwright Microeconomics and Behaviour, and C I Jones Macroeconomics. Starting to read either of the first two will help with the beginning of the course. Jones will be used after Christmas. Older editions of these books are fine and can often be found at second hand prices online.

Nearly everyone will also need to learn some mathematics. Again, knowledge of A‑level material or its equivalent is not assumed, but starting with some of the work before term is a good idea. There are many books with titles like ‘Mathematics for economists’ and so long as they start at a level which is appropriate for you, there is little to choose between them. However, some examples would be:

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Timbrell, M., Mathematics for Economists

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Kennedy, G., Mathematics for Innumerate Economists

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Anthony, M. and Biggs, N., Mathematics for Economics and Finance

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Black, J., and Bradley, T., Essential Mathematics for Economists

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Holden, K., and Pearson, A.W., Introductory Mathematics for Economists

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Dowling, E., Mathematical Methods for Business and Economics, from the Schaum’s Outlines series (students with no background in Mathematics have found this book particularly useful)

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Chiang, A.C., Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics (starts at a similar level to the other texts listed, but takes many ideas a bit further)

Reply 2

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Original post

by Abhipsa

Your college will send you a reading list for anything you need to read before you go up in advance. If they don't send you anything they won't expect you to have read anything specifically.

They will almost invariably use the same textbooks at Oxford as at any other university. Also I suspect that as with most universities, they do not "set" textbooks and you will just be free to use whatever textbooks you find suit your learning style to support your learning of the material from lecture notes etc.

Tutorial topics will no doubt vary by college/tutor and I suspect they will not make these available before you are due to be doing those tutorials so that when you are taking the tutorials you are preparing for them in the expected timeframe (rather than having started planning your first tutorial essay 3 months before everyone else who went up).

I can't see how past exam paper questions would help you before you even begin studying the material. If you feel otherwise you can always make a FOIA request for those, or see what has been requested previously. I suspect it's less useful than you think before you are actually at the point of preparing for the exams.

Reply 3

Stiffy Byng

Congratulations. OP. I hope that you enjoy Oxford. Reading lists will probably arrive soon after A level results day.

I add that a FOIA request is needlessly cumbersome, imposing a cost on the university or college. Past papers are freely available when you are at Oxford. To me, a FOIA request also feels adversarial, although that's partly because FOIA requests are part of the aggressive public law disputes culture which I sometimes inhabit.

When I studied history, the choice of subject for each tutorial was discussed and agreed between tutor and student for each essay. The tutor would ask, at the end of a tutorial "what shall we do next week"? and I would say "how about witchcraft in sixteenth century Anatolia?", or something. That may reflect the broad and flexible nature of the history degree. The exam papers were little booklets with loads and loads of questions from which you chose three.

E and M is likely a bit more structured, but it is still quite broad, as far as I know. Things like Physics may be a bit Week 1 "great big explosions", Week 2 "evil robots", Week 3 "really tiny things", and so on.

One of the best things about Oxford is that you should be able to ask your tutors about stuff. Instead of some lecturer whom you see once a week from the back of a room full of people, and who has an office hour once a week that nobody goes to, you can see your tutors often, academically and sometimes socially. We used to send each other postcards via the pigeonholes in the lodge in the days before emails. "May I come and see you?", or "Come and see me", etc. Walking around the quad or up and down the High Street talking to your tutor was a thing. Tutors used to pjn notes, sometimes witty, occasionally grumpy, on the noticeboard in the lodge, when addressing the cohort.

I don't know if tutorials with pints in the King's Arms are still a thing. Probably not. "Well, John, that's where Wittgenstein makes his blunder, I'm, sure you'll agree" used to amuse the tourists, if nothing else.

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 4

xyz1234567

Please don’t make a FOI request - it is the perfect way to annoy your tutors before you even start and as Stiffy says will make you seem very adversarial. An FOI immediately puts a burden and a stress on admin and academic staff in the middle of the time they are a) trying to take holiday or b) trying to get their research done and while they will be duty-bound to comply, they will not be happy about it, especially when they have probably made a decision about what timetable is best to send out reading for (some college tutors don’t like to send it out before results are in as they feel it can add to the disappointment if a candidate misses their grades).

Reading lists will be sent out soon if they want you to read anything. If you don’t hear anything after A level results day then you can drop a polite email to the admissions office asking if they have any advice and it will be forwarded on. At the moment they are in embargo and so are not allowed to communicate with offer-holders in any way and so you will not get a reply until after the A level process is complete and all decisions about offer-holders confirmed.

If they don’t send any reading, they are not expecting you to do any, so enjoy your last free summer!

Reply 5

xyz1234567

PS all tutors will have their own reading lists and tutorial questions (which are their own intellectual property) and so there isn’t really such a thing as sample tutorial questions as it depends who is teaching you, as well as on your own interests and preferences. There really isn’t a need to look at the exam papers before the start of your first term - that can wait for the time being.

Reply 6

sfp04

I’m a PPEist, so I can at least give you some pointers on the economics side of E&M. As others have said, the best thing to do is to wait for your college to send you a reading list. In the absence of that, a good place to start might be the free online CORE textbook — it’s specifically pitched at beginner undergraduates, and is written in a fairly engaging and fun style (at least as far as economic textbooks go!). Parts of the first year economics course at Oxford are loosely based on it, although the course ends up moving beyond it to a more advanced level.

One thing that econ tutors often send out for summer reading and work is the department’s Maths Workbook, various copies of which you can easily find by searching online. Which sections are relevant to you will depend on how much maths you did at A level or equivalent, and how secure you feel in it, but there will almost certainly be some stuff (e.g. partial differentiation and Langrangians) that you won’t have covered at school. In general, one of the best things for econ that you can do over the summer is making sure you arrive feeling confident in maths (above all, differential calculus).

As far as textbooks are concerned: for micro, there is no set textbook. I personally like Varian, but there are lots of other perfectly good ones. Macro is slightly different, in that, at least when I was in first year, the lecture course was broadly based on Jones. But again, other options are available. I would hold off on textbooks for now, both because they’re not exactly fun summer reading and you might not even get much out of them yet, and because your tutors might have specific ones they prefer, so you don’t want to be blowing money on a textbook you’re not going to end up using.

I wouldn’t bother with past exam papers or tutorial sheets at all yet. They’re likely just to look incomprehensible/intimidating at this point, which is to be expected as they’re aimed at students who have actually started studying the course!