Natural Sciences Durham Time Spent Studying

I've got an offer for Durham Natural Sciences (planning on going the bio/chem route) and would love some insight from current students (at Durham or anywhere with a similar course) on the number of hours spent working outside of contact hours and how much time people have for societies, sports etc. Thanks!

Reply 1

DurhamRep Lesath

Official Rep

Original post

by Anonymous

Hi!

Durham definitely does give a lot of time for their students to do extra curricular stuff! Whilst the exact number of contact hours you have will depend on the course you do, it does generally stay around 10 contact hours per week (depending on how many seminars you have that week). There are some modules which are compeltely conducted in either Michaelmas or Epiphany term and so the number of contact hours you have can vary quite significantly. However, most of the time, students are free on Wednesdays after 1pm (though this is not guaranteed) for sports and societies. A lot of people join in on college sports and societies as well (usually early in the morning or late in the evening or on weekends) so that is also an option!

Hopefully that gives a little overview of some (of the many) extracurricular things you can do at Durham. It definitely is part of our culture here!
– Lesath (DU Rep.)

Reply 2

Anonymous #2

Original post

by Anonymous

Hi, my son is first year Natsci at Durham. He is physics and earth sciences. The subjects/modules you take will definitely make a difference but I think Natsci is pretty heavy on the timetable compared to other subjects. He has 20 hours a week timetabled, I think he has two 3 hour lab type sessions that don't use the full time allocation all the time and some (I think 2 a week) of his sessions are "drop in" if you need it. I get the impression that how much extra work you do varies a lot by student. I think my son spends a good portion of time on top of that per week working as he likes to review his work as well as do the required work...hard to know how much but it feels like it rounds up to about a total of 30-40 hours a week. Others he knows do just the bare minimum extra work and seem to have great social calendar and sporting lives. He has managed a couple of weekend trips with societies and he does some sessions with college sports and societies and one uni sport dev session every week(2 days a week his timetable runs til 6pm and sometimes that clashes with his college sport sessions so he has to miss those ones). He's also been to at least 2 formals and 1 ball (that I know of) and he does spend a bit of time hanging out in the JCR. He did say that he would have loved to join a couple more societies and college sports but he just can't fit it all in so it really does depends on how you choose to balance your time and what type of activities/sports you want get involved with and how heavy your timetable is. He absolutely loves it at Durham though and seems very happy with the balance he's found. Good luck!

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