Universitas

There seems to be a dearth of posts during my time in Oxford. I’ve always wanted to do a good post about my life there just to document stuff and then forget about it before I enter my new life. It is also one of my habits to document my life after a phase has passed, and this is definitely one of those times when a major shift occurs and suddenly a chunk of my life becomes history. Well, history has to be kept and for the past few weeks I still think about Oxford, and it seems so surreal, like I have never actually studied there and there are these memories implanted in me. It seems like out of my flow of life. If my life is like a regression line, Oxford is like an outlier, a part of the model, but I have since returned to the line and then moved on, and what are left are my experiences which I shall elaborate on below. Do note that all these are personal opinions and cannot be taken for facts.

I shall focus on just the academic aspects this time, like my course and studies. I enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Management. It is not a double degree like what many people think, it’s a joint degree, something like you graduate after learning two subjects, but the content and work input is the same as any other degree. It is jointly offered by the Social Science Department and the Said business school. The Social Science department is quite straightforward. That’s where the economics department is and they also run identical economics courses to the PPE and HE (history/economics) students. The Business School is quite an interesting case though. They seem to be a separate entity from the University running their own exclusive programs and courses with little synchronization with the Colleges of the University. It is a place dominated by Masters Students, with the usual MBA people with their business suits all the time, and the Master of Financial Economics, Executive MBA etc. The school building is a really stylish one, with lounges and formal chill-out areas for these professionals to do their “networking”. All in all, it seems like a new addition within the last 20 years to accommodate the new business education. Yeah, business education is new in the UK. According to some journal article I read while I was there, being a tradesman, or being part of businesses and firms is not something desirable until really recently. It was not seen as a prestigious occupation and hence there were no business schools in the UK until the 1900s. Anyway, the practical nature of business seems to run against the academic nature of Oxford, just one of my personal observations. Yep so this is the background of the faculties I was enrolled in.

My course itself can be explained by dividing it into three parts – Economics, Management and Math/Stats. Economics is fairly straightforward. Microeconomics for 1st year is basically a direct copy from Intermediate Microeconomics by H. Varian. For all the tutorials, copying something from Varian is probably all that you need to do. There are two lectures a week delivered by this guy who is quite monotonous, who believes strongly in the rigorous nature of microeconomics as derived from the basic principles of completeness, reflexivity and transitivity ( i.e. Everything in this world can be compared, with good A = good A, and A>C if A>B and B>C). One interesting thing I learnt in Microeconomics is this Lagrangian function. Sounds complicated at the start but after a while it’s quite straightforward. Just differentiate all the equations and then apply simultaneous equations. There is one piece of written work to be handed in each week which will be gone through in that week’s tutorial. Economics simply follow this basic pattern for two terms. The written work is quite straightforward for all of first year, nothing really strange and yeah, most of them are derived from the past-year preliminary examinations questions.

My economics tutor is this guy who is rather down to earth and goes through the tutorial questions in great detail, with the occasional touch of ingenuity once in a while that makes his lessons quite interesting. His approach however was mostly theoretical and loves mathematical proofs more than one written in prose which at times makes more sense to me. We would each be called in turn to present our answers to the rest of the tutorial group (which consists of 4 people), but he will end up taking over and then do more of the talking than anyone else with great attention to all the details.The economics tutorials were quite alright for our purposes in trying to apply our understanding into answering questions, and seem to be the most thoroughly crafted subject in terms of its content and delivery.

Mathematics follows the same pattern as well. You go for a lecture on a topic, do some written work about it which will be gone through in the tutorial at the end of the week. The mathematics topics covered are far from difficult, I think more than half of it is covered by the A levels syllabus and the other new stuff are not difficult at all and can be understood quite easily given a background in mathematics. It was mainly about the economic applications of maths, such as finding the equilibrium output (intersection between two lines) and finding point of lowest Average Cost (differentiation; stationary point). Most of the maths topics are quite no-brainer and the tutorials can be done in like a couple of hours with procrastination. However, the examinations for maths are really different from the nerfed tutorials. The marking scheme is such that every step has to be substantiated with something related to economics and failing to present some quantities means losing a hell lot of marks. I learnt the hard way by failing one of the collections (start of term tests). Statistics is also covered as part of this subject and it is rather challenging, one aspect of the course I like. I studied for statistics instead of maths after giving up on understanding the marking scheme for maths and it did deliver quite good results.

Anyway my maths tutor was more or less ineffective at anything, explaining mostly the obvious points during class and cannot really answer the questions that are uncommon and especially the ones which appear at the preliminary examinations. Just to give him some credit, I actually look forward to his lessons for all the digressions from the lessons as he explains his life story, not to mention the fact that he really is a friendly person I just feel this sense of affinity to. He is a D.Phil (PhD) student for Economics for development and a random Google search I did one day while I was bored showed that he was quite an active academic and an advisor for economic development in his home country, Peru. If I had more interest in the subject, and a little more patriotism, I can foresee myself going in the same path as him, studying Economics to a really high level and then being a consultant in development matters. There are a couple of occasions when I met him at the social sciences department library and he would say hi. A really nice guy, but still, he did not seem very familiar with the Mathematical/Statistical Methods paper and was not an effective teacher. In fact, apparently no one is familiar with the M/S paper other than the guy who set the paper since it is quite a new subject (which they decide to be a failure and scrapped it after my year) and what is in or out of the syllabus has been changing drastically over the past few years. No one even knows for sure whether we are expected to perform end-correction for answers derived from a Normal approximation of the Binomial distribution. I really felt like on my own in the last term when studying for the exams, it’s like eff this and just study on my own, but even then I don’t know how I will ever fare in the prelims. It seems like years of learning answer schemes, how to beat the game seems quite different now that you just don’t really know what the game is and there are only books which tell you what it’s about but not actually how to own the exams.

Management is an altogether different subject as compared to the other two. In general, it encompasses topics such as strategy, operations, finance, marketing etc. There are loads of readings to be done, like a hell lot. Reading in this instance is to source for points, evidence, examples, arguments for the sake of writing essays, which happens to be the one and lofty goal of this subject. It was reiterated to me on my first tutorial, that the point of this course and the teaching is to allow us to perform in the essay-based examination. I would spend the days of the week writing the essays (which are simply a rehash of what I read in the books and journal articles), and in the tutorial, the large concepts of the topic will be outlined, such as which author’s ideas are relevant and what are the main schools of thought which are always examined and tested in the preliminary examinations.

This is a subject which I feel is really restrictive. There is basically no room for my own thought, my own arguments and all my essays seem to be simply a debating ground of random management writers such as Mintzberg, Handy, Norman, Biggs et al. There more I read about management the more I feel that there is nothing to be learnt at all. The more I study, the more I realize that research fails to show anything or describe any part of businesses in any useful way. It is mainly just some rambling discourse about a knowledge which probably does not exist in any scholarly form, but simply in the unwritten guides and ideas in the minds of real practitioners, the businessman who deals with the playing field instead of the academic articles which makes attempts to name the colour of air. The practical nature of this topic, which I believe require more exposure than essay-writing is further repressed by the strong academic stance the Business School has on their one and only undergraduate curriculum. The definition of a good essay is one which is able to integrate relevant ideas from management academics to answer the given essay question. It is simply a mish-mash of everything you can remember from the ‘scholarly articles’ and then phrased together. To graduate after doing all these, I don’t think anyone will be any step closer into understanding companies, let alone run them. I guess this is the subject I am most disappointed in.

To be fair, I did have an amazing management tutor. She is rather task-oriented, knows what has to be done and then work towards it. My weekly essays were marked with great attention to every detail and I was given appropriate comments for me to work on my writing, so as to achieve greater success in the exams.. It also seems to me that she had a wealth of life’s experience from really extensive travelling and meeting a lot of different types of people. Bits and pieces of these life experiences flow out during tutorials when she elaborates her points with her experiences and quotes from some random academic. Best of all, she was a nice lady, and was supportive of me leaving the course when I told her about it. She felt that one should only do things one is interested in, and so sent me off with well wishes. I felt really touched then.

From the larger perspective, I don’t think there is any point in a business degree. I believe that one should go to university to learn stuff, and preferably stuff which is useful in the future, or at least stuff which makes you a more informed and educated person in general. A business degree fails in all these. Whatever is learnt will not be useful in real businesses, seriously due to the extremely contextual nature of businesses where circumstances vary all the time. Looking into what is learnt, as I have explained earlier is to make out the shape of something which is not there. For most of the statistical surveys, correlation coefficient between any two variables (say profits and product variety) is like in the range of <0.1. I guess this is expected with the tons of variables available and it is simply impossible to put a shape to something like business, which I would describe to be gaseous.

Well, the above are what I have learnt over the past year, and some of my thoughts about how I learnt and what I learnt. Most of the above took place in the first two terms of the year (out of three), with the final term used for revision. Oxford’s terms are rather short, with 8 weeks per term to a total of three terms. After 16 weeks of learning stuff, there is then 8 weeks of revising stuff. So I guess out of 52 weeks I was only on the receiving end of knowledge for 16weeks. This is quite a good use of my year I should say. I guess my disillusionment was at its highest during this last term in Oxford. I simply felt that I am not doing anything productive with my own definitions. It was an empty feeling as my sense of idealism slowly seeps away to make way for a mindset bent on memorizing points and concepts for the examinations. Over the next two years I will be learning more economics and maths and management, a repeat of what I did over the past year. If I were to continue, it would be for the sake of completing the finals examinations. Will I emerge as a more educated person by simply completing that piece of examinations? What will I be able to do after I step out of the university after completing those examinations which I presently am unable to do? I guess I would have another certificate with me, which proves that I am able to sit for examinations and nothing else.

It might be alright if I don’t proceed, but it seems that I am moving backwards, in terms of my ability to think critically and work with others. I was simply expected to do what I was told, which is to go to the library( or go online) to get all the stuff on the reading list, return to my room to read the books and then crank out essays, tutorials and solve math/stats problems on my own. The content and delivery, like the university, seems to be locked in the past while many others haves started on the more holistic route to create an educated and productive person at the end of the university education.

Well, over the course of the past year, I guess I did learn some bits of stuff, such as the fundamental theories of economics (some of which make sense but don’t seem to be very practical, Chin Nam can destroy these notions quite easily with some common sense), some general concepts about what businesses are and challenges facing businesses (change is the only constant!) and of course made sure that my maths did not go rusty after leaving the RJ LT1. Besides that, it made me realize how I miss the sciences and gave me a sense that I should use my life in a more fulfilling way, and that life is finite and every bit of it counts.

I guess this is my one and last relook at my one year of University education, and a commentary on one of the most distinguished university in the world. It has been two months since I handed in that form and up to now, there was never a tinge of regret, only happiness that I am finally going in the right direction from now. I can’t wait to make up for lost time and go on.