Studying Chemistry at Oxford

Hi. I got an offer to read chemistry at oxford (st.hildas). I'm really excited about this and was wondering if anyone could give advice on what to expect. How much contact time is there, what is the course like in each year, how did you find the transition between A-levels and uni. I have vague ideas, but honestly any and everything would be useful (even answers to questions I didn't ask) :smile:

Reply 1

The_Lonely_Goatherd

Congrats on your offer! Tagging @TypicalNerd (if I recall right, they're a current Chemistry student at Ox) :h:

Reply 2

TypicalNerd

Original post

by The_Lonely_Goatherd

Congrats on your offer! Tagging @TypicalNerd (if I recall right, they're a current Chemistry student at Ox) :h:

Thanks for the tag - you recall correctly

Reply 3

TypicalNerd

Original post

by JQ2neeky

As above, congratulations on your offer!

To be quite honest, the answers to a number of your questions really depend on how St Hilda’s does things (which I can’t offer much insight on). As each college is an autonomous body, they are given control of when and how they carry out the tutorials. As such, this will affect the number of contact hours per week, how much work you are expected to hand in per week etc.

I’m only in my second year and so I can only really tell you what to expect from first year. I recall that when I started, much of the content was entirely new and we weren’t just recapping A level as many subjects do at the beginning of the degree. The material covered in the first term (Michaelmas) wasn’t terribly interesting as it was the most fundamental stuff (i.e very little synthetic chemistry), but things got much more interesting in the Hilary and Trinity terms and I personally enjoyed these terms the most.

You are expected to do at least 48 hours of work a week (tutorials, labs and lectures included) and most of this work is done independently. You will be expected to make the fullest use of your textbooks and Canvas to access any resources you will need to complete tutorial sheets (sometimes covering material in tutorials ahead of when you cover it in the lectures). In any case, expect two hours of lectures per weekday (the timetable can be found with a Google search), 12 hours of labs on most weeks (split into two 6-hour afternoons in the lab) and however many hours St Hilda’s allocates to tutorials per week.

You should study all three fundamental fields of chemistry and some selected topics from maths in first year. The maths is what most incoming students ask the most about in my experience. For starters, you will have very few problems with it if you did A level further maths. Much of the maths they teach you is covered in the pure maths in A level FM, though there are concepts such as partial differentiation and exact differentials that you won’t have come across before. If you did not do A level FM or do somehow find the maths difficult, there is an excellent book written by D.S. Sivia (my maths tutor last year) and S.G. Rawlings called “Foundations of Science Mathematics”, which is well worth a read.

Feel free to ask any further questions about labs, lectures etc.

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