This is a quick rundown of every course I’ve taken as part of my degree, and some thoughts on them. I expect that this will be the most interesting and helpful to future and current first year PPEists at Oxford, and more specifically ChCh.
Philosophy:
Overall, I was satisfied with the quality of philosophy teaching in ChCh. I would have wanted the tutorials to be longer (1.5-2h instead of 1). I wish I had been in a tutorial group with people who were more interested/invested in philosophy, since better discussions make me happy and I make more progress. I also wish that I could have studied every topic in the syllabus, instead of the college picking topics to maximise exam preparation.
Intro to Logic
I was pretty mediocre at logic and found natural deduction challenging at the beginning, but I did the entire Natural Deduction Pack over the winter vac and ended up becoming quite good at it. Although I was good at it, I didn’t necessarily find it too fun, so I might not take it in the future unless for signalling purposes.
Moral Philosophy
I loved my moral philosophy course because it was based around Mill’s utilitarianism and non-consequentialist critiques. Some of my peers found this scope extremely restricting, given that there are other prominent branches of ethics (virtue ethics and Kantian ethics) that were very quickly glossed over. Nevertheless, this course was probably the most impactful course for me, since it led me to abandon utilitarianism as an ethical theory (but not as a theory of change). #TODO I want to write about this in the future.
General Philosophy
I didn’t start off caring much about general philosophy. Free will was my favourite topic (since I wrote an essay on it in high school). I didn’t think that topics like personal identity, skepticism and induction mattered much to my life (I was predominantly concerned with how to live a good life). However, during the prelim revision period I found the skepticism topic perhaps even more interesting than free will, since I was able to resolve my radical skepticism through Moore’s “proof” of the external world. I found it quite convincing after a smart friend explained it to me, whereas during the tutorial I thought Moore was absolutely crazy.
Politics:
I really enjoyed politics even though I initially wanted to drop it.
Practice of Politics
I really enjoyed practice of politics because it pushed me to become very analytical and detailed focused. I enjoyed more empirical, modern topics like populism and party systems (since it’s become very relevant to politics today). I found the bigger topics like democratic peace theory and revolutions to be conceptually interesting, but too vague to write anything interesting and meaningful to me. In the end, I revised for all the empirical topics I studied, and I was very happy to see them all connect with one another.
Theory of Politics
The biggest factor in me enjoying theory of politics was my tutor, who was a very progressive feminist scholar in post-colonial theory. I felt like my tutorials were a safe space largely due to my tutorial partners and my tutor. Again, I wished we could have studied more of the topics instead of just 4, since I found free speech and rights very interesting. I chose the topics that were the most interesting to me (Marx and imperialism) and I think I had a lot of interesting things to say about them.
Economics:
I don’t know if its because I’m burnt out or I didn’t like my tutor, but I don’t like economics as much. I feel disillusioned by the vibe in the economics societies/students I hang out with and the political implications of mainstream economics. This is probably a negative update towards getting a graduate degree in econ.
Microeconomics
I didn’t really enjoy microeconomics. I felt like I was answering questions in a very formulaic way (there are only a few types of questions for each concept, and all you had to do was rehearse some things to write, check corner solutions, etc.). Sometimes I felt like I was learning how to do capitalism. I’m not very interested in economic libertarianism, e.g. Coase Theorem. Unfortunately, it seems like I will have to take it next year since it is one of the only technical papers.
Macroeconomics
While I enjoyed the part of macroeconomics that is learning and applying models, I didn’t really like how it relied a lot on “intuition”, which my tutor said I was lacking. I’m also unsure what the point of making all these models that don’t consistently hold is. Looking back, I wish I had spent more time on the reading and learning about real world applications, since that is probably the most useful part of the course.
Probability and Statistics
I found it very easy, boring, and formulaic. Nevertheless, the statistics part is minimally useful for machine learning (iid sampling, Bessel’s correction).
Next year, I will probably take: Microeconomics, Quantitative Economics, and either: a) International Relations, Comparative Government, and Practical ethics (2 Pol + 1 Phil) OR b) Ethics, Knowledge and Reality, and International Security/IR (2 Phil + 1 Pol)