Oxford – Page 7 – a sibilant intake of breath

Twenty months in Oxford

With a few weeks left before exams and about a month left before leaving Oxford, I find myself thinking backward and forward more than in the present. As such, even though I have every reason to be quite busy, I am feeling somewhat in the lurch. Those bits of life that feel most immediate don’t have anything to do with the M.Phil program. Actually, now that seminars have ended, I rarely see any members of the group aside from the ones I live with and a couple of others who are neighbours. I am looking forward to our post-exam barbecue on the 14th as the last instance in which I am likely to see more than a dozen of the program’s twenty-eight members in one location together.

Thinking back to the first few months in Oxford is unusual. They seem much more alien to me than the last year, as well as any of my time at UBC. To begin with, I was living in Library Court. I was eating bagels and cheese, more than anything else. I was spending quite a bit of time in pubs, as that seemed to be the major venue for social interactions. Largely on the basis of where I am living now, life has a much more normal and natural feeling. As revision has been showing, even the material that I was working through back then has become rather unfamiliar in the interim. It would be hard to say with certainty whether a paper I wrote in October 2005 was actually written by me, or by someone with the same reading list and a similar style of writing and analysis.

In any case, I am looking forward enormously to knocking off the last few academic items that need to be completed in Oxford. I am hoping that I will then have the chance to focus on what has been best over the last two years. I certainly hope that I will get to try punting at least once before departing, as well as see some of the friends who have been fixtures of life at various times, but who I now hardly ever see.

Ignatieff speaking in Oxford

One upcoming talk that may be of particular interest to Canadians in Oxford is being given by Michael Ignatieff in the hall of Wolfson College this Thursday. The talk is the annual Isaiah Berlin lecture, and it is on the topic “Political Judgement: Theory versus Practice.”

Ignatieff is one of the most well known Canadian academics, as well as a recent contender for leader of the federal Liberal Party, so I suspect this talk will attract a fair bit of attention. It starts at 6:00pm.

One of his books – Blood and Belonging – was mentioned here before.

Four hurdles left

And so, fifth week has begun. In three weeks, I will be sitting down in the Examination Schools and writing my final exams. Developing and maintaining motivation with regards to final exams is a lot more difficult than it was in the case of the thesis. I suppose that comes down to how one of them is meant to be the culmination of a great deal of thought and effort, whereas the other is just the requirement to throw some good essays together on topics that you could more or less forget the next day, if you wanted to.

Motivated or not, I need to get on top of this. If I am going to have time to write practice examinations to discuss with Dr. Hurrell, I am going to need to finish revising for at least two of my exams post-haste.

Temperature and civilization

While in high school, Sid Meier‘s Civilization II was a time waster of choice. The prospect of directing human civilization for 6,000 years has an understandable appeal. By the time I was at UBC, Civilization III had eclipsed its predecessor. I once spent more than thirty consecutive hours playing it; at the end, I lost a massive thermonuclear war with Mahatma Gandhi. These games satisfy a number of driving human ambitions: from virtual immortality to the ability to be in control of human progress to the chance to decimate one’s enemies with precisely planned joint warfare operations.

I haven’t played any Civilization games since arriving in Oxford, but an aspect of our present situation has reminded me of it. One important technology for moving into the modern era in the game was refrigeration. As of now, our flat is deprived of this technology. Given how fruitlessly and noisily the compressor on our fridge seems to operate, I suspect that the coolant has escaped. Hopefully, it wasn’t comprised of ozone-depleting CFCs.

[Update: 21 May 2007] Because the compressor was running pointlessly, we chose to turn it off. Unfortunately, a member of the St. Antony’s maintenance team came by this morning to investigate our fridge complaint. Rather than knocking or waking anybody up, it seems he just came in and turned on the (useless) compressor, probably muttering to himself about what fools we were to complain of a broken fridge when it was only actually turned off.

I guess we will need to leave it on, eating up power and whining pathetically, until the college dispatches another of their stealth repair operatives.

Richard Horton on health and development

Richard Horton’s presentation to the Global Economic Government program was probably the most passionate I’ve seen in the past two years. He is certainly the only person who spoke at such a loud volume for an entire hour. Much of what he said was quite interesting, particularly in terms of the relationship between development and health and the peculiarities of the World Health Organization.

My notes are on the wiki.

People interested in global health, development, trans-national civil society, and the like should definitely have a peek.

Multilayer booms

Of late, I have been watching Yes, Prime Minister between bouts of revision. In one sense, it is quite disorienting. As someone who has lived beside a clock tower for more than a year, having a series of booms now and then is not at all unexpected. The series, however, uses similar sounding booms as a frequent sonic backdrop. As such, one gets the awkward sense that time is racing forward: hardly an effective way to control stress in the lead-up to exams.

In a different light

Every once in a while, the Natural History Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum hold an event in the evening. The main area of the Natural History Museum gets nicely illuminated and you get the chance to explore the Pitt Rivers Museum with a torch. That’s the British term for a flashlight, alas. There will be no carrying around pitch-soaked bundles on sticks. That would suit the mood of the Pitt Rivers, but would unacceptably endanger the artifacts. These two museums are certainly the most interesting ones in Oxford, and quite essential for all students to see before they leave.

Even so, such events are well worth attending. Last time, there was an elaborate shadow puppet show. The next one is happening on Saturday May 19th. It runs from 8:00pm to 11:00pm. My account of the previous event can be found here.

M.Phil final exams

In less than a month, the members of my course will be writing our final exams. Everyone has one on history from 1900 to present and another on international relations theory. Then, each person has their two optional papers. Mine are international law and the developing world. For each exam, we will be presented with twelve questions. Of these, you need to answer three, each by means of an hour long essay. Twelve hour-long answers over the course of three days and the M.Phil is complete. Passing all four is necessary to pass the M.Phil.

On the basis of how questions are fairly consistent from year to year, the most popular strategy is to prepare on a number of `topics.` For each, you identify and seek to understand the key bits of the secondary literature. Then, you try to come up with a clever seeming argument and map out – in general terms – how you would approach the question. Several course instructors have encouraged us to use this kind of approach. According to the Notes of Guidance:

In the written examinations, answers which merely regurgitate facts or opinions will not suffice: answers must be well structured, relevant to the specific question asked on the examination paper, well written, and show mastery of the subject.

I take “mastery of the subject” to mean having read and understood the appropriate academic sources. For examples of consistency between questions year to year, have a look at some past history questions and past theory questions.

My initial plan was not to use the topic-based approach. For our qualifying test last year, my approach was simply to re-write all my notes, re-do some of the most important readings, and then write some practice tests. That has the virtue of comprehensive coverage, but it does not prepare you as well for a question that you have anticipated than the topics approach does. Working on selected topics allows for a depth of knowledge and an opportunity for organization that is likely to be advantageous for Oxford-style examinations.

The biggest challenge relating to the finals is the sheer breadth of material. For each of our 24 core seminars and 16 optional seminars, there were two or three questions for consideration. For each of those, about ten readings were listed, most of them books. Provided you read 3-5 sources per question per week, that is easily several hundred complex articles or books. Even going back over notes on nearly one hundred different discussion topics is daunting. On one level, the volume of work involved in preparing for finals is a good thing, as it demonstrates the breadth of the program. At another, it demonstrates one’s cognitive limitations quite effectively.

My biggest problem, as far as these exams are concerned, is that I have never been particularly good at remembering who espoused what theory. Given the extent to which academic international relations is a name-game in which big egos dominate and every scrap of credit is fought over, this is a considerable defect for someone considering any further involvement with the academic world. I could imagine being familiar with all the big names in one’s particular sub-field of IR, but the thought of doing so for every major branch of the field, from the history of the interwar period to the economics of foreign aid, seems quite beyond my capability.

Soon to be smokeless

A sign I passed this evening reminded me of how I will only be around to appreciate one day of the new UK smoking ban in enclosed public places, such as pubs. I would not hesitate to call it long overdue. It will make conditions better for people who work in pubs, improve overall health, and end the experience of smelling like an ashtray for days after spending any time in such places.

Of course, it will probably take months for the majority of the smell to seep out from chairs and curtains around the UK. Once that has happened, however, the UK will be a more modern and appealing place.

Cameron Hepburn on climate economics

Dr. Cameron Hepburn gave an informative presentation in the Merton MCR this evening on the economics of climate change. While it was largely a reflection of the emerging conventional wisdom, it was very professionally done and kept the audience in the packed Merton MCR asking questions right until it became necessary to disband for dinner. Dr. Hepburn, incidentally, is my friend Jennifer Helgeson’s supervisor.

My notes are on the wiki.

PS. When I imagined Oxford before coming here, the kind of rooms I imagined were more like the Merton MCR than most of the places I have actually seen. That probably derives from having my expectations defined by The Golden Compass and The Line of Beauty.